Mother Jones respects free expression and dissenting voices.
We accept advertising because it helps pay the costs of publishing independent, nonprofit journalism. While we are proud of the professional relationships between our advertising staff and marketers, we are also committed to the integrity of our mission. Mother Jones is in business to produce great public interest journalism—no strings attached. In doing so, we reserve the right to investigate and write critically about any issue, individual, or company.
Advertising does not reflect the views of Mother Jones or its staff. However, we reserve the right to reject specific advertisements that, in our judgment, undermine the integrity and character of our brand, fail to meet our production standards, or blur the distinction between client-paid promotion and Mother Jones’ editorial content.
Examples of this include:
- Any content that contains false, misleading, libelous, exploitative, hateful, or illegal elements.
- Headlines or subject lines that mischaracterize the content or the facts, or that conceal the conditions for engagement, such as inviting users to take an action conditioned on a donation or purchase without disclosing that condition.
- False functionality, such as an element designed to generate a click without leading to the expected or relevant content, such as misleading “close” icons or a landing page that does not match what a user would expect.
- Text or images that are likely to make a user believe that they are viewing a news report when in fact they are not (for example, text such as Breaking News, Consumer Alerts, or images, names, and logos that mimic media outlets).
In general, however, we believe that our readers are smart and skeptical enough to evaluate advertising for themselves. If you see ads that you believe violate our standards (many ads come from third-party networks that Mother Jones does not operate), please let us know so we can fix the problem.
We invite comments from readers and advertisers about this policy.
Send your comments to:
Monika Bauerlein, President and CEO, Mother Jones
P.O. Box 584
San Francisco, CA 94104-0584
phone: (415) 321-1700
fax: (415) 321-1701
Or contact the advertising department.
