April 1, 2014

This Weekend, Yet Another “60 Minutes” Screw-Up

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On Sunday I watched 60 Minutes and caught their segment about the Tesla Model S. They had some footage of the car zipping along the road, and I was surprised by the throaty rumble it made while it was accelerating. It’s an electric car, after all. It shouldn’t sound like a Corvette.

Please note: I am, at best, a minor league car guy. I know very little about cars. But the sound of the Tesla S immediately drew my attention. Yesterday, 60 Minutes said it was all a mistake:

Our video editor made an audio editing error in our report about Elon Musk and Tesla last night. We regret the error and it is being corrected online.

This is not really believable. If I noticed this, then a minimum of dozens of people who worked on this segment would have noticed it. Besides, where did the V8-audio come from? Did the video editor just “accidentally” pull some off the shelf and mix it in? Repeatedly?

WTF is going on with 60 Minutes these days?

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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