January 4, 2021

It’s a Fox News Universe and We All Just Live In It

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Over the weekend we learned that President Trump had begged and cajoled and threatened the Georgia secretary of state to manufacture a few extra votes so that Trump would be the winner of the state. Was that illegal? IANAL, but it sure seems illegal to me! And if it’s not, it should be.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz was acting as the leader of an even dozen Republicans who said they would vote to delay Senate approval of the Electoral College results on Wednesday. But that’s not all! Asked about this, he had the gall to say that everyone was getting too bent out of shape about it and we should all calm down.

Mean-meanwhile, several senators, including four Republicans, wrote a letter saying they would vote to approve the Electoral College results. In one sense this is a relief: four Republicans plus all the Democrats is a majority in the Senate, which means the results are certain to be approved and we can all move on.

But! Four Republicans. That’s it. Apparently the letter writers couldn’t dig up any more than that. So what’s going to happen on Wednesday? Are a bunch of Republican senators going to join up and give the Electoral College results a firm approval? Or are the four letter signers going to be it, providing us with the banana republic spectacle of a 51-49 approval?

All of this reminds me of two things that I’ve mentioned before:

  • All of the buffoonery and conspiracy theorizing surrounding the election has been led by Republican politicians who have no actual authority over election results. It’s just hot air. Conversely, every official who’s actually in charge of vote counting has acted honorably.
  • Whenever I look below the surface at something like this, I end up concluding the same thing. It’s not the Republican Party per se that’s gone nuts, it’s the right-wing media empire. It’s Fox News and OAN and Mark Levin and all the rest of the insane talkers whose only objective is to keep their ratings high by competing to see who can keep their listeners the most outraged. Republican politicians are in thrall to these voices and don’t dare to cross them.

As long as Fox News exists in its current form, American politics is going to be broken. But what’s the answer to that?

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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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