April 5, 2018

In Latest Attack on Washington Post, Trump Takes a Crack at Headline Writing

It’s never too late to change careers.

Dennis Brack/ZUMA

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In a presidency marked by unprecedented chaos, President Donald Trump’s animosity for “fake news”—accurate reporting by mainstream news outlets that typically include the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and NBC—has been one of the few constants.

In recent days, Trump has taken to specifically targeting Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos for stories in the Washington Post, which has won major awards for its reporting on the Trump administration. (Many of Trump’s tweets are wrong: Amazon does not own the paper; Bezos does.) While the president has attempted to couch his attacks on Amazon with the false claim that the company takes advantage of the US Postal Service, it’s clear that Trump’s anger lies with the paper.

On Thursday, Trump made that even more apparent. He also may have inadvertently revealed another reason behind his latest revenge obsession: his private ambitions to become a newspaper editor. 

If true, Mother Jones invites the president to our robust Slack headline channel, where editors would be happy to workshop the far-too-wordy, nonsensical headline proposed above.

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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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