May 22, 2020

The Week In Review

Tia Dufour/White House/Planet Pix via ZUMA

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Let’s take a look back over the past week:

Monday: Trump announces that he is taking hydroxychloroquine. “I was just waiting to see your eyes light up when I said this,” he tells the assembled reporters. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens.

Tuesday: Trump goes on a Twitter rampage over Obamagate.

Wednesday: Trump says that he will “ask” to withhold federal funds from states that adopt mail-in ballots, even though he has no authority to do this and everyone knows it. Many thumbsuckers follow.

Thursday: Trump plays coy about wearing a mask in a Ford factory he’s visiting. “I wore one in the back area,” Trump tells reporters, “but I didn’t want the press to get the pleasure of seeing it.” The press can’t resist chasing after him anyway.

Friday: In an effort to prove that they can be as stupid as Trump, liberals go ballistic over a lame joke that Joe Biden told on air. Republicans join in, naturally, which makes it a “bipartisan condemnation.” This is catnip for the press.

Writing about Monday’s revelation, media critic Jack Shafer says the press needs to stop playing along with this nonsense:

I’d like to think that calling attention to Trump’s decoy move might reduce its effectiveness. But I’d be wrong. In Trump’s book, any mention—neutral, praiseful or critical—is a win because it takes our eye off of what really matters. When it comes to obvious Trump provocations like self-dosing of hydroxychloroquine, the only way to blunt such media manipulation is to ignore him as much as possible. Do your part. Flush Trump’s crap from public mention.

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times responds:

Yep, even Jack. The key thing here is that no one is suggesting the Times not cover this at all. Everything a president does gets covered. But stuff likes this needs to be a blurb on A17. On TV it needs to be a 15-second segment at the end of the news block. Online it should be a throwaway mention or less.

After three years, we should all know that it’s pointless to demonstrate that Trump is stupid. The people who care already know it, and the people who don’t care won’t be swayed. So just give his shiny objects the coverage they truly deserve. In most cases, that’s almost nothing since they’re obviously substance-free and designed solely to play the media. Why go along with Trump’s almost contemptuous—and quite public—strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” as a way of keeping the press under control?

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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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