Death at Sochi: Time to Give it a Rest?


I thought maybe I was the only one who was getting a little annoyed by this, but apparently not:

Nate Carlisle, a reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune, the hometown paper of many ski and snowboard athletes, has been running a spreadsheet calculating the number of stories featuring competitors’ dead relatives. Through Saturday, Carlisle found, there had been 25 such stories, an average of nearly three per day. On Sunday night the death preoccupation continued when NBC’s Christin Cooper prodded Bode Miller, after he won bronze in the Super-G, on the loss of his brother, prompting the skier to fall to the ground in tears and the Twittersphere to light up.

Carlisle’s spreadsheet is here. He’s now up to 29, and that’s not even counting all the tearjerking stories that stop short of death (Alex Bilodeau’s brother with cerebral palsy, for example). I get that this stuff might appeal more to other people than it does to me, but come on. Enough’s enough. We shouldn’t pretend that tragedy and pain are what motivate most athletes, or that they somehow give athletic accomplishments more depth and meaning. There are plenty of other ways to humanize the winners and losers at Sochi.

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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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