January 4, 2016

News Media Infatuated With Donald Trump, Part 4,387

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Oh come on. A front-page piece about the fact that Donald Trump is airing a TV ad? Seriously? And the article itself is even worse:

The Republican presidential candidate’s long-awaited and hotly anticipated first ad, which was shared exclusively with The Washington Post, is set to launch Monday as part of a series that will air in the final month before the Iowa caucuses. Trump has vowed to spend at least $2 million a week on the ads — an amount that will be amplified by the countless times they are likely to be played on cable news and across social media.

Would the Post do this for any other candidate doing something as routine as airing an ad? Has it really been long-awaited? Or hotly anticipated? And shouldn’t that last line say “cable news and print media offered ‘exclusive’ looks”?

I know it’s tedious to complain about the mainstream media going gaga over everything Donald Trump says, but WTF? It’s an ad. There’s nothing special about it. It’s just a narrator saying the same stuff Trump has been saying forever. It’s not raising the temperature of anything. So why not just write a short blog post about it and move on?

In other news, apparently there’s a crazy woman who’s been following Hillary Clinton around for years in order to harangue her about Bill’s alleged sexual misconduct. She did it again today. In other words, this is practically the definition of “not news.” So why is it news at the Post?

The allegations of misconduct that have swirled around the former president for years have reemerged in the campaign recently, thanks to GOP businessman Donald Trump, who has said that those allegations are fair game on the campaign trail.

So there you have it. If Donald Trump writes a bunch of tweets about dogs biting men, then it’s news. Crikey. And as long as we’re on the subject, here is Trump once again selling the myth that he’s self-funding his campaign:

Trump said his advertising blitz is being financed chiefly out of his own pocket….“All me, 100 percent me — 100 percent,” Trump said. “I’m self-funding my campaign. We do have small donors that send in $12, $25, $100, but they just send it in. We’re not asking for it.”

Uh huh. Except, of course, for the fact that “Donate” buttons are the main things highlighted at the top of Trump’s web page. And if you click one of them, the donation page asks for contributions from $10 to $2,700. And that’s actually Trump’s main source of funding, not his own pocket. But sure. Other than that, he’s totally self-funded and he’s not asking for anything.

I’m curious: Is Donald Trump even capable of opening his mouth without saying something untrue?

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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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