December 17, 2008

Person of the Year


PERSON OF THE YEAR….In a shocking surprise, Time has named Barack Obama their person of the year. Yawn. I would have voted for one of those cheesy group picks, in this case “America’s mortgage bankers and Wall Street rocket scientists.” I mean, if touching off the 21st century version of the Great Depression doesn’t make you person of the year, what the hell does it take?

Runners up were Henry Paulson, Nicolas Sarkozy, Zhang Yimou, and, in a tremendous diss to poor old John McCain, Sarah Palin. Feh. Tina Fey would have been a more deserving choice.

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

Headshot of Editor in Chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

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