October 31, 2009

White House Visitors

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Today, under the headline “Transparency like you’ve never seen before,” the White House released visitor records from January through June.  But wait!  It’s not all the visitors.  It’s only a selective dump of names that people specifically asked about.  Someone submitted a request about Bill Ayers, for example, so all the “William Ayers” records were released.  But guess what?  There’s more than one guy in the country named William Ayers:

A lot of people visit the White House, up to 100,000 each month, with many of those folks coming to tour the buildings. Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few “false positives” — names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else.  In September, requests were submitted for the names of some famous or controversial figures (for example Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly (“R. Kelly”), and Malik Shabazz).  The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House.  Nevertheless, we were asked for those names and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names.

Hold on there.  This data dump includes everyone who’s been on a public tour of the White House?  Everyone who’s been invited to some kind of White House ceremony?  Seriously?

Yes, seriously.  Max Doebler, for example, is the White House ceremonies coordinator, and sure enough, there are 29 visitor records linked to luncheons and receptions where he’s listed as the official host.  Bill Ayers is one of the many people who were there for public tours.  (Plus a second mystery Bill Ayers who was there for some other reason.)

This is kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?  I suppose it’s easy enough to filter out the dross once you figure out the right codes, but it almost seems like the White House is deliberately trying to inundate everyone in useless mountains of data by including this stuff.  In particular, when the end of the year rolls around and we get the full dump, do we really need the names of all 500,000 people who have been on a tour of the residence?  Is it even right to make all these names public?  Is the White House staff playing a quiet little joke hoping for a few reactions like this?  What’s going on?

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists 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 hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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