American Media Suffering From Desperate Lack of Pro-Trump Voices

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It turns out that a lack of manufacturing jobs is not America’s only problem. There’s also a lack of columnists willing to defend Donald Trump:

As they discovered during the long campaign season, the nation’s newspapers and major digital news sites — the dreaded mainstream media — are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect. Major newspapers, from The Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months. So have regional ones, such as the Des Moines Register and Arizona Republic, which have a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

Here’s the problem: these folks are not looking for writers who will defend particular Trump policies from time to time. They want columnists who will regularly defend all Trump policies. And here’s the catch: they want people who are non-insane.

That’s hard. But perhaps it’s a business opportunity for me. I could do this, I think, if I put my mind to it, but for obvious reasons of self-respect and the loss of all friends and family, the pay would have to be very high. So the question is, just how desperate is the media for a seemingly rational pro-Trump voice? Are they willing to pool their efforts to make me a highly-paid syndicated columnist who defends Trump no matter what he does?

Let’s see how serious they are. Show me the money, people.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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