This Is the Predictably Awful Way Fox News Reacted to the CIA Torture Report

On Tuesday the Senate released a long-awaited, scathing report condemning CIA torture methods during the George W. Bush administration. The report outlines horrible abuses including “rectal feeding” and “ice-water baths,” but only the geniuses over at Fox News could see what it was truly about: Obamacare.

The hosts of Fox News’ Outnumbered were convinced the report was made public in order to distract from Jonathan Gruber’s testimony on Obamacare this morning. Jesse Watters, who says he would have rather remained in the dark, because after all people do “nasty things in the dark” all the time, said he found the timing of the report’s release “ironic,” which it is not.

Watters then went on to compare the torture report to Rolling Stone’s botched sexual assault reporting at the University of Virginia, because why the hell not?

“They didn’t even interview any of the CIA interrogators who do the report,” Watters explained. “It’s kind of like how Rolling Stone does their stories—they only get one side. And to say this is about transparency at the CIA, the Democrats didn’t care about transparency when they were destroying hard drives at the IRS.”

(h/t Media Matters)

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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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