September 25, 2013

The Way We Live Today: From Tweet to Meme in 14 Hours


The political branch of the intertubes today has been consumed by the question of whether the media is hopelessly biased because it treated Wendy Davis’ abortion filibuster more sympathetically than Ted Cruz’s kinda-buster on Obamacare. The whole fuss is so mind-crushingly inane that it’s enough to make one fear for the future of the human race, but still I’m curious: where did this meme get its start?

It apparently went mainstream in a Dylan Byers column posted today at 10:00 am. Dave Weigel says the meme was “codified” in a Tim Carney column posted a few minutes earlier at 9:44 am. Tom Kludt of TPM noted the invention of the meme an hour before that, at 8:57 am. He’s got tweets from Erick Erickson and Byron York from even earlier in the morning, and one from Richard Grenell late last night. But the earliest mention is from Laura Ingraham, who tweeted about this an hour before Grenell, at 8:20 pm last night.

But wait! Ingraham was retweeting Chad Seiter, who was responding to a dismissive tweet from Jennifer Rubin. Seiter’s tweet went up at 8:10 pm:

So as near as I can tell, that’s where it came from. A guy in Kentucky with 187 followers on Twitter got retweeted by Laura Ingraham, and by the next morning his tweet had morphed into a media bias meme that went viral. Congratulations, Chad! You won the internet today. Isn’t social media remarkable?

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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.

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