September 8, 2016

Matt Lauer Gives a Master Class on How You Bomb an Interview With Donald Trump

The reactions have been swift and brutal.


Matt Lauer has been met with a firestorm of criticism for his lackluster performance during his televised forum with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on Wednesday. Journalists and viewers alike are taking the longtime NBC anchor to task for his handling of Trump’s portion of the event, in which he failed to pose tough questions or follow up on blatant falsehoods, such as the GOP nominee’s thoroughly debunked claim that he opposed the Iraq War before it started.

“I heard Hillary Clinton say that I was not against the war in Iraq,” Trump said during the forum. “I was totally against the war in Iraq. You can look at Esquire magazine from 2004. You can look before that.”

As many outlets, including Mother Jones, have reported, Trump did in fact support the Iraq war. Yet Lauer failed to push back, instead gliding to the next question about concerns over Trump’s “temperament.” Questions about former campaign chief Paul Manafort, whose work for a pro-Russian political party, Ukraine, and other controversial lobbying clients contributed to his recent ouster; Trump’s attacks on the Khan family; or his own military deferments were nowhere to be found.

The reactions to Lauer’s performance were swift and brutal, and resulted in the hashtag #LaueringTheBar.

The silver lining is that Lauer won’t be moderating any of the upcoming presidential debates. But with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, one of the four journalists who were indeed picked, already balking at his job to be the “truth squad,” the final push to November is looking ever more excruciating.

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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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