Mother Jones
What does it take to complete a major investigation? A lot of coffee, for one. But the key ingredient is probably the one that journalists have the least of these days: time. Time to run down leads that don’t pan out. Time to deeply understand an issue. Time to keep sources safe. Time to badger, pester, and sometimes sue government agencies to liberate information that belongs to the public.
This issue that you’re holding contains about seven years’ worth of reporting. And it’s the direct result of the support we have gotten from you, our readers. Just look around at newsrooms without that kind of community support: The few reporters still on the job often have to publish at a frantic pace, 24/7, with barely so much time as to fact-check a press release or call BS on a politician’s spin.
But the results when you can take the time are so worth it. For more than 10 years, the author of our cover story, Mark Follman, has been reporting on mass shootings, extremism, and political violence at Mother Jones. His work has had a huge impact in the conversation about gun violence, and he wrote a powerful book about threat assessment—a discipline that can bring communities together to prevent mass shootings.
Through that reporting, Mark met Chin Rodger, whose 22-year-old son committed a particularly infamous mass shooting in 2014, and who has now dedicated her life to helping others understand the warning signs. For three years, Mark worked to figure out how to tell Chin’s story, sensitively, to a wide audience. The resulting story is everything a magazine piece should be: deeply researched, complicated, challenging.
Pairing such long-form writing with immersive audio journalism was one of our goals when we merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting earlier this year. Now that we have the talented audio team behind the public radio show Reveal (find it on your local station or favorite podcast app) as part of our newsroom, we can add a whole new dimension to a story like this.
To hear from the parent of a mass shooter at all is rare. But to listen to Chin’s voice, along with Mark and the experts poring over how to prevent a tragedy like this—that goes straight to your heart. Together, the audio documentary and the magazine piece give you insights neither of them could alone.
The merger also included a team dedicated to telling stories in perhaps the most immersive format of all, documentary film. Just as you get this issue, a movie seven years in the making will be coming to theaters. The Grab, which the Los Angeles Times called “a sleek, complex international thriller, where nothing less than the future of the world is at stake,” dives deep into the global battle for food and water and shows how powerful interests—including Erik Prince, formerly of Blackwater—strategized to secure access to “the new oil.” Did you know that Saudi companies are sucking water out of the Arizona desert to grow hay that they ship to feed cattle back home? That the war in Ukraine plays into Vladimir Putin’s plan to secure food dominance?
They say journalism is the first draft of history. But sometimes it’s more of a complete rewrite. What most people learn in school about the phrase “40 Acres and a Mule”—if they learn about it at all—is a tale of a broken promise made to formerly enslaved people. But what our two-year investigation found is a more complicated, and more damning, reality. For thousands of people, the promise was briefly real. They received titles to former plantation land, and an opportunity to create self-governed Black communities. And then, it was all taken away.
Until now, how this happened, and to whom, was largely impossible to say, because the stories of those families were buried in the frayed records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the post–Civil War agency set up to help formerly enslaved people. But a few years ago, our colleagues from the Center for Public Integrity began digging through those records, and they partnered up with the Reveal team. Together, they spent two years deciphering documents, doing genealogical research, and tracking down living descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers. They found that some of the stolen land, much of it along southeastern coastlines, now houses fancy (and nearly all-white) developments. And they created a tool where anyone can look up Freedmen’s Bureau records—including the land titles, but much more as well. It’s an incredible feat of journalism, part of which is contained in this issue, but here too the audio version really adds something magical. Our three-part Reveal series, where you can hear from the descendants directly, drops right around Juneteenth.
When we brought these teams together, we crossed our fingers that the Mother Jones and Reveal communities would help sustain them. Over the next few months, we’ll find out if that’s true. You can pitch in at motherjones.com/donate, allowing us to do the kind of journalism that only time makes possible.
