News of Mother Jones’ new Washington, D.C., bureau—the first major news bureau to be opened by a U.S. media organization in years—is being noticed by the MSM. Click here for a piece by the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz.
If you’re just tuning in to this change, we’ve expanded our D.C. bureau from 2 to 7 journalists. Our plan is to dig even deeper into the most important stories from the nation’s capital and to have the results land with more impact in the media and political worlds.
Why this matters plays out virtually every day in the news stories trumpeted the loudest by the mainstream. A case in point is Newsweek‘s current (August 13) cover story—”Global Warming is a Hoax*,” by science correspondent Sharon Begley. It is absolutely an important story, fingering “the well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change” and the special interests that fund them.
That there is a well-funded denial industry won’t, of course, be any shock to Mother Jones readers—MoJo‘s cover story on ExxonMobil’s multimillion-dollar support of the climate change deniers was published in April 2005. A year later, the MJ feature was nominated for a National Magazine Award for public service, and Al Gore plugged it on “Fresh Air” —the story received a lot of attention from people who pay attention. Still, out in mass media land the insidious effects of the denial spin doctors have continued to muddle public understanding of the scientific consensus, thanks in significant measure to the history of big media (like Newsweek) giving credence to the deniers.
Point #1 is obviously that two and a half years is too much lag time between when a big public interest news story is broken and it’s, uh, accepted by the MSM. But point #2 is that we (that is, Mother Jones, other independent media, and you) are in a great position to change that.
So that’s what we’re doing: putting more reporters on the most significant public interest stories and making full use of all of the cheap and powerful new media tools around us to bust the BS. In doing that, we can respond to BS and spin quickly, debunking it before it becomes the conventional wisdom of the MSM.
Here’s who we’re putting on the scent:
• Laura Rozen, who’s covered national security and foreign policy as a senior correspondent for the American Prospect and on her blog, warandpiece.com, as well as in the pages of Mother Jones.
• Stephanie Mencimer, the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door, an investigation into conservative and corporate attempts to limit corporate liability and to restrict people’s access to civil court remedies through “tort reform.”
• Bruce Falconer, who joins Mother Jones after working for several years as a staff editor and writer on international assignments for the Atlantic Monthly.
• And Jonathan Stein, who started at Mother Jones in San Francisco 18 months ago and helped produce the “Lie by Lie” timeline as one of the lead researchers on the project.
Together with Jim Ridgeway and Dan Schulman, they make up a crew of smart, independent journalists who bring years of savvy reporting experience to the job. Get used to seeing their names; they’re already posting online, including on the MoJoBlog and in Washington dispatches. Click to see some entries by Ridgeway and Schulman, Rosen, Falconer, and Stein.
This is an ambitious project for Mother Jones. We need to raise $60,000 in the next few weeks to complete the D.C. bureau. If you value original reporting that makes an impact on politics and media, I hope you’ll make a tax-deductible donation.
It’s also why we’ve pulled together some cool prizes to give you an extra incentive to hit the “donate” button. But time is running out, the deadline for our campaign is midnight tonight, Friday, August 10, 2007 for you to make a gift and be entered to win a super prize.
If you’ve already made a contribution, thank you very much. But if you haven’t, please take a moment now to do so.
Jay Harris
President & Publisher
