Adventures in Stenography

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/moon_child/3965679774/">moon child</a> (<a href="http://www.creativecommons.org" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a>).

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Some articles make you less informed after you read them. Exhibit A is today’s New York Times story on the federal debt limit, which was raised last night. Here’s one paragraph that illustrates the problem:

Lawmakers quickly returned to partisan sniping before voting 218 to 214 to raise the federal debt limit, with each party blaming the other for running up the national debt over the last decade.

The article then continues on for another thirteen paragraphs without even attempting to inform the reader about anything other than the two parties’ talking points. At no point does the Times let readers know that which party is mostly to blame for running up the national debt is an empirically verifiable fact. It’s not a matter of partisan opinion. The Times could have even gone to its own reporting on this subject. In June, the Times ran an article by David Leonhardt explaining that most of the deficit is due to the recession and the Bush tax cuts—not overspending by Democrats in Congress, President Obama’s budget, or even the bank bailouts. If the author wanted some partisan balance, he could have mentioned Leonhardt’s conclusion that Obama doesn’t have much of a plan for closing the gap.

The article could also have referred to this study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which was conveniently released just yesterday. It’s called “President Obama Largely Inherited Today’s Huge Deficits: Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers.” It even comes with a pretty chart, which you can see to the right.

Times readers who relied on this failbag of an article are now less informed than they were before they read it. For all those readers know, President Al Gore and Speaker of the House Dick Gephardt were the ones running up the deficit after Clinton left office.

Why even bother writing the article if you’re not going to try to adjudicate a factual dispute? Next time, the Times should simply republish the Democrats’ and Republicans’ press releases and be done with it. FAIL.

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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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