We Need to Figure Out How to Fight Weaponized Disinformation

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re raising money for a new team to fight disinformation here at Mother Jones. Our fundraising drive is nearly over, so I wanted to make one more pitch for contributions.

I think that conventional wisdom says that fundraising appeals should either be scary or hopeful, but I can’t honestly do either one right now. I’ve been blogging for 15 years, and there’s never been a day when I wanted to stop. That includes all the George Bush years, all the obstruction years, and even last year. But it’s getting harder. Donald Trump has really gotten to me.

Atrios likes to remind us that George Bush was a worse president than Trump. Technically, that’s true: he launched a stupid war that killed thousands of people and probably prevented us from winning the war in Afghanistan that we really needed to win. Trump hasn’t done that yet—though he might, given time.

But there’s more to a president than that. There’s also the content of his character. I will never let Bush off the hook for approving the torture of enemy combatants, but at least he had the excuse of doing it right after 9/11 and the decency to be sort of embarrassed about it (thus the euphemisms). Trump, by contrast, considers it “strong” to loudly and proudly support torture—and the worse the better. Bush also wasn’t racist, something he demonstrated a number of times. Trump appeals to the worst kind of racist and xenophobic sentiment, and he’s dragged the entire Republican Party along with him. Bush lied like any other politician when he needed to, but Trump casually lies about everything just for the hell of it. He’s also ignorant, deliberately nasty, and has based nearly his entire presidency on taking revenge against Barack Obama. I could go on.

This makes Trump far worse to take on a daily basis. It’s one thing to understand that writing an analytic blog doesn’t really have much chance of changing things, but it’s another to live with a president who has simply made facts irrelevant. What’s the point of refuting lies that everyone knows are lies and no one even bothers defending in the first place?

This is why I’m actually pretty excited by the idea of a disinformation team. My style of blogging isn’t well suited to the Trump era, and it’s obvious that the mainstream media is almost completely hamstrung in dealing with it. We need something new, and I hope this team comes up with it. Not snark, not PolitiFact, and not reams of charts. Something better. But we can only do this if we get the money to get this team going. And there’s nothing that would make me happier than for my audience to pitch in bigly for this effort. You contributed $14,000 last time I asked. How about another $14,000?

Click here to make a tax-deductible donation. We hope to raise $350,000 before June 30—$250,000 to meet our budget, and an extra $100,000 to get this special project off the ground. There’s no better cause. Or, if money is tight, click here to find out other ways you can help.

And here’s your reward: a cat that I photographed in Los Angeles last night at the corner of Eagle and Clarence. He is watching to make sure you donate something.

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.

payment methods

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.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate