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I’ve already defended former NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller’s right to tell a prospective donor that he thinks tea partiers are motivated by racism and xenophobia. Schiller isn’t a reporter and, right or wrong, his view is a fairly widely held one. There’s nothing beyond the pale about expressing it.

But there’s more. Lindsay Beyerstein has now watched the entire 2-hour unedited video, and says Schiller actually acquitted himself pretty well:

If you watch the entire conversation, it becomes crystal clear that O’Keefe’s provocateurs didn’t get what they were looking for. They were ostensibly offering $5 million to NPR. Their goal is clearly to get Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley to agree to slant coverage for cash. Again and again, they refuse, saying that NPR just wants to report the facts and be a nonpartisan voice of reason. Schiller pointedly informs the fake donors that NPR broke with some very generous Jewish benefactors who had supported NPR for over a decade because they tried to tell NPR that it “couldn’t have so much Palestinian coverage.”

“And we said, ‘sorry,'” Schiller says, “And we lost their funding, and it’s gone.”

In light of the Blaze post, James Poniewozik of TIME’s “Tuned In” blog admits that he reposted O’Keefe’s video without watching the entire two-hour exchange and suggests that many other reporters did the same. Poniewozik speculates that O’Keefe posted the extended video because he was confident that “by the time anyone took the time to go over the full video, the narrative would be established, the quotes stuck in people’s minds and the ideological battle won.”

Of course that’s what O’Keefe does. Talking heads on TV do this routinely, spouting obvious falsehoods because they know that 5 million people will hear them say it and only 50,000 will ever see the correction (if any). This is so common that it’s practically taken for granted these days.

Still, O’Keefe is in a class by himself on this score. As Lindsay, says, “At this point, any news outlet that runs an uncorroborated James O’Keefe video is committing journalistic malpractice.” Yep.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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