When There’s a News Scandal, You Can Count on News Organizations to Clam Up

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Erik Wemple’s year-end roundup column focuses on one of my pet peeves: the almost total lack of transparency from news organizations that routinely demand transparency from everyone else. One of Wemple’s observations is that this is a bigger problem on TV than it is elsewhere:

Whatever their relative merits on openness, TV outlets keep a tighter lid on information than, say, newspapers or Web outfits, those radical organizations that occasionally allow their reporters to simply hop on the phone and speak about their jobs! The New York Times’s Carr tells the Erik Wemple Blog, “I think that’s because people [in TV] see themselves as talent, and not journalists.” Those “talent” people, too, know better than to shirk the folks in the media department. On those occasions when the Erik Wemple Blog manages to get face to face with broadcast types, they’re generally very diligent about referring us to their PR overseers.

The bulk of the column is devoted to various media transgressions that resulted in refusals to comment; anodyne “statements”; and flat claims that nothing could possibly be amiss in the first place. For example:

On Oct. 27, “60 Minutes” aired its now-infamous investigation on Benghazi….The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone documented the stonewalling that he received upon pressing CBS News about the discrepancies….“60 Minutes” more recently took a beating for its coverage of the National Security Agency…Let’s turn to correspondent Sharyl Attkisson….Fox News in 2008 planted a false tip with a reporter who was working on a story about the ratings success of CNN. After the reporter published a piece based on the tip, Fox News trashed him.

And so on. The whole column is worth a read. News organizations aren’t shy about insisting on accountability from everyone else. They should provide a little more of it themselves.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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