From the Washington Post:

This story has all the usual markers of internet reporting idiocy. It’s got the overwrought headline. It’s got the faux outrage from a tiny number of tweeters. It’s got the ending quote from an academic:

Alicia Jessop, a sports law professor at Pepperdine University, said IHOP’s Mother’s Day tweet, and the blowback it received, should serve as a lesson for companies on what not to do the next time they want to pay respect to mothers on their big day. “This Mother’s Day is a case study in social media strategy,” Jessop said.

Yesterday the Post ran a similar story about two (2) Republican members of Congress criticizing Rep. Rashida Tlaib for completely made-up reasons—which the article acknowledges. Then why write it? Why even give it the publicity? Is invented outrage from two (2) idiots in Congress really enough to justify the headline “House Republicans criticize Rep. Tlaib over remarks on Holocaust, Israel”? Or to justify writing anything at all?

Stop it. Just stop it. We don’t have to give endless publicity to cranks and idiots—or PR stunts—just because it’s a slow news day and social media stories are easy to write. These aren’t real controversies and the Post knows it.

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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.

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