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During his June jaunt through New Hampshire, Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Manchester’s Union-Leader newspaper and signed reporter Jim Schaufenbil’s copy of our story about Newt’s shady book deal with Rupert Murdoch (May/June). “He just smiled and nodded,” Schaufenbil reports.

We can only imagine what he was really thinking. We had just excerpted a leaked document outlining Newt’s televised college class (“Will Newt Fall?July/August). That document has since been included in the House Ethics Committee’s probe into Newt’s finances. The outline for the “nonpartisan” course credits “powerful institutions such as the big-city machines, the labor unions, and the left-wing activist groups (including trial lawyers and gays)” for keeping the Democrats in power. The course outline proposes political countermeasures for the GOP.

Still, few in the press have reported much on Newt’s political machine and how he spent the at least $10 million in undisclosed donations to GOPAC, his political action committee. Meanwhile, they’ve focused on the approximately $100,000 at stake in the Clintons’ fishy Whitewater investment. Even before the Senate’s Whitewater hearings began, there was a clear disparity between the numbers of stories published on each scandal:

Whitewater GOPAC
New York Times 754 61
Los Angeles Times 531 33
Washington Post 827 87
Wall Street Journal 534 40

Source: Lexis-Nexis; Dow Jones News Retrieval

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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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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