December 18, 2015

New Poll Breaks Record For Honest Answers

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In my Twitter feed, everyone is getting a big kick out of the question on the right from a recent PPP national poll of Republicans. Agrabah, it turns out, is the fictional city where Aladdin lives in the 1992 Disney cartoon. I’ve never seen the movie, so I didn’t know this before today.

Anyway, as much as I applaud PPP for turning their polls into a continuing series of jokes, I think people are taking the wrong lesson from this. Is it shocking that 30 percent of Republicans want to bomb a city they’ve never heard of? Not really. Maybe they confused it with Ar Raqqah, the ISIS capital. Maybe this was just a way of showing that they support a stronger bombing campaign in general. Who knows?

No, the big news here is that 57 percent admitted they weren’t sure. This is amazing. In polls like this, “Not Sure” usually gets about 10 percent, even for questions that it’s dead certain most people have no clue about. Overall, this poll question demonstrates an admirable ability to admit ignorance. That’s far less common than you might think.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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