Smoked Out

The tobacco industry huffed and puffed at us in 1979. Today, even though it’s still intimidating journalists and lavishing money on legislators, the industry is in a more difficult spot.

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Not long after Mother Jones was founded, the magazine faced a dilemma sure to rattle any publication striving for both journalistic integrity and commercial viability. Tobacco companies offered the fledgling journal a sizable and steady flow of cigarette ads.

The offer sparked a heated debate on the magazine’s editorial board, as members sought to balance devotion to free speech, fiscal reality, and their political consciences. “We knew what it was like to be shut out by the media,” recalls Editor in Chief Jeffrey Klein, then part of the five-member board. “The question was: Do we have a right to censor someone’s ad just because we believe they’re merchants of death?” In the end, board members voted 3 to 2 to accept the tobacco money, and to demonstrate the magazine’s independence, they also commissioned an exposé on the deadly effects of cigarettes.

Published in January of 1979, “Why Dick Can’t Stop Smoking” offered a scathing look at what writer Gwenda Blair called “one of the country’s most profitable and, in turn, most politically powerful industries.” Long before the current federal focus, Blair described nicotine as addictive. She also outlined how the industry uses campaign contributions to influence members of Congress and lucrative advertisements to “make most of the nation’s press afraid to print stories like this.”

As a professional courtesy, Mother Jones gave tobacco manufacturers advance notice of the cover story so they could pull their ads from the issue. Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and others responded by canceling their entire commitment: several years’ worth of cigarette ads. In a show of corporate solidarity, many liquor companies followed suit.

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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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