Chamber Challenges MoJo to Fact Off And…

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Today the US Chamber of Commerce fought back against its critics, taking issue with my assertion that it routinely inflates its membership numbers. “Yes, there are two numbers, direct membership and our federation members–there have always been,” wrote Chamber representative Brad Peck on the Chamber’s blog. “Both are represented at the Chamber, and we represent both on Capitol Hill.”

Peck is correct that the Chamber has cited both numbers (including at a press conference on October 7th). I acknowledged as much on October 14th, when I noted every instance that the 300,000 number appeared in the news database Lexis-Nexis. But what he doesn’t say is how infrequent that’s been. Total number of uses: three (plus at least one use by the Wall Street Journal, which does not appear in Lexis-Nexis). Contrast that with the number of times the “3 million” figure has appeared: somewhere north of 200. As I’ve argued, this suggests that the Chamber has been extremely reluctant to cite its real membership number since it began using the “3 million” figure in 1997. Nothing Peck writes refutes that claim.

Indeed, my assertion is borne out by the Chamber’s own website and press releases. With no qualifiers, they repeatedly use variations of the same line:  The US Chamber represents “3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” Meanwhile, the 300,000 figure appears nowhere on the US Chamber’s website, uschamber.com. The only time it ever shows up on the seperate URL of the Chamber’s blog is today (in response to Mother Jones), and in quoting the above-mentioned Wall Street Journal story. And the Chamber is guilty of more than a sin of omission. Consider the following quote to the New York Times last month from Chamber spokesman Eric Wholschlegel: “We have over 3 million members, and we don’t comment on the comings and goings of our membership.” 

Furthermore, Peck cites no evidence to support his claim that the Chamber represents both membership figures on Capitol Hill. Indeed, the 300,000 number does not appear in any of the transcripts of the Chamber’s Congressional testimony on Lexis-Nexis, but the “3 million” figure often does.

The real purpose of Peck’s blog post appears aimed at minimizing  the significance of my reporting by arguing that the ensuing story was not a true “expose” or “result of months of sleuthing.” But I’ve been the first to note that the 300,000 figure was out there for anyone to see. Peck ignores my main point, a point nobody else was making: The Chamber’s true membership number had been obscured for more than a decade by its claim to “represent 3 million members” that, in reality, don’t qualify for US Chamber membership benefitsdon’t pay it dues, don’t get to vote to elect its board or leadership, and don’t have any effective say in setting its policies. I’ve also shown that those “members” often don’t know that the Chamber is counting them, nor want it to.

In addition to discounting my reporting, Peck characterizes Mother Jones as an untrustworthy news source that shouldn’t be relied upon by the mainstream media. How then does he explain the fact that Mother Jones won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence last year? Not mainstream enough? (Maybe he just objected to Mother Jones‘ editors saying that the Chamber is hostile to investigative journalism.)

Finally, I’d like to conclude with six questions for Peck (not that I expect to get a response, given that I never have from the Chamber until today):

  1. Will you change your website and press releases  to clear up the difference between your so-called “direct members” and “federation members”? 
  2. Will you allow all of your 3 million “members” to vote to elect your board and/or leadership and/or set your policies?
  3. The US Chamber’s federation partnership program allows local chambers to give free, automatic US Chamber memberships to their small business members. But only 354 local chambers (make that 353, since San Francisco dropped out of the program last week) actually participate in the program out of thousands of local chambers nationwide. Even with this program, you only have 300,000 “direct members.” So isn’t this a clear rejection on the part of most local chambers of the idea that their millions of members should be counted as your members? 
  4. Do the US Chamber’s “federation members” qualify for all of the “member benefits” listed on your membership page? If not, why call them “members”?
  5. Some local chambers (San Francisco, for example) provide a public database of their members. Why don’t you?
  6. Your website says that more than 96 percent of your members are small businesses. Are those dues-paying members or “federation members”? And why does that percentage matter when your board of directors, which controls your organization, is overwhelmingly made up of large companies?

Peck addressed the membership issue in the context of a broader attack on Washington Post columnist Steven Pearstein, who’d cited my reporting in a column about “three embarrassing truths about the Chamber.” Peck’s response to Pearlstein is deeply inadequate. Mojo’s Kate Sheppard debunks’s the Chamber’s purported support for action on climate change here.

UPDATE: Peck responds again here (and his post is cached here; the site seems to be down now), but declines to answer my questions because they are “predicated on a notion that we claim 3 million members dishonestly.” My response is that many if not most questions are predicated on some sort of notion.  He also argues that Mother Jones, on its website, claims to reach 2 million people, while the print magazine has 230,000 subscribers. But Mother Jones has never claimed 2 million “subscribers.” The Chamber repeatedly claims 3 million “members.” If the Chamber wanted to call them something else, like “underlying members” (the term used early in the reign of Chamber president Tom Donohue), then fine. But they are not members.

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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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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