December 14, 2015

Today’s Completely Invented BuzzFeed Meme That’s Sweeping the World

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This is amazing. There’s a trending meme on social media that’s starting to gain steam on ordinary old media: Who should have been Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year? Serena Williams or American Pharoah? The answer, of course, is Serena Williams, because SI has chosen human beings for this award for the past 60 years. Secretariat didn’t win it. Seattle Slew didn’t win it. Affirmed didn’t win it. And now, American Pharoah hasn’t won it. This is because they are horses, not human beings.

So what’s the deal? Apparently BuzzFeed managed to start all this by publishing a piece noting that a few horse racing fans were upset that American Pharoah didn’t win. Not lots of fans. Just horse racing fans. And not even a lot of horse racing fans. Just a few. But some of them complained on Twitter! Maybe a few dozen or so. That’s about 0.00003 percent of the Twitter population.1

In other words, BuzzFeed spun a piece out of almost literally nothing, and now the rest of the world is talking about it. Truly we live in a miraculous era.

POSTSCRIPT: For those of you who aren’t tennis fans, trust me: Serena deserved this. Her record this year was almost beyond belief, and that’s at the age of 33, when most top tennis players are either retired or just barely holding on. And of course, that’s on top of a career that makes her a strong candidate for best tennis player of all time.

1More or less. Actually, I just made up this number, since it doesn’t deserve the time it would take to come up with a real one.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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