January 16, 2009

PETA Says: Save the Sea Kittens

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lol_seakitten300.jpgDoes this count as Friday cat blogging? Your answer to that question will reveal just how kooky or clever you think PETA’s new “Save the Sea Kittens” campaign is. What is a sea kitten, you ask? It’s the animal-rights group’s cuddly new name for what is commonly known as fish. According to PETA, fish have an image problem: They’re scaly, slimy, and, uh, fishy. (And they don’t blink. Creepy.) “Who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?” asks PETA. We’ve done lots of serious reporting on overfishing and other threats to the animal formerly known as fish, but it’s hard to imagine anyone taking those issues more seriously if we’d talked about the plight of the sea kitten. And besides, humans kill lots of animals even though they’re cute (baby seals) or feline (tigers). Fish don’t have a PR problem, they have an edibility problem. So I propose only using the term sea kitten only for ridiculous seafood news. Like, say, actors claiming to have gotten mercury poisoning from eating too much raw sea kitten.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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