May 10, 2016

Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

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The latest micro-flap for conservatives to feel victimized by is an allegation by one guy that the Facebook team that selects “trending” topics is staffed by a bunch of Ivy League 20-something liberals:

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

That was yesterday. Here is today:

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, led by Republican Sen. John Thune, has launched an inquiry in response to recent news that Facebook was reportedly suppressing conservative news items in the “trending” section of the site. The committee, which oversees Internet communication and media issues, drafted a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking about the curated section, telling the tech giant to “arrange for your staff including employees responsible for trending topics to brief committee staff on this issue.” Thune signed the letter, which also asks for “a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.”

Here’s my question: Even if the allegations are true, in what way is this the business of the United States Senate? Facebook is a private entity and it can highlight any kind of news it wants. Ditto for the Drudge Report, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Mother Jones. Thune should take a closer look at the First Amendment before he goes any further.

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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.

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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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