March 10, 2014

“24: Live Another Day” Will Deal With US Drone Warfare


Last Friday, Fox posted a new trailer for 24: Live Another Day, the upcoming limited event series that continues the famous Jack Bauer action saga (which wrapped its initial eight-season run in 2010). The show, starring Kiefer Sutherland as counterterrorism agent Bauer, came on the air just two months after 9/11, and frequently incorporated the political debates and context of the post-9/11 world. 24 got a reputation for right-wing Bush-era messaging (Bauer tortures a whole lot of people, and often extracts the world-saving information he needs very quickly), but also featured oilmen, shady business interests, and Republican politicians at the center of terrorist conspiracies.

Flash-forward to 2014, and you’ll find 24‘s political framing has adjusted accordingly with the times. In the new trailer, you’ll catch a brief shot of an anti-drone protest in London during the US president’s visit. “Drones DESTROY our Humanity,” and so forth, the placards read:

24 tv show Fox drones

Fox/YouTube

“We have analogues for the Snowden affair and the drone issue is a backdrop,” executive producer Howard Gordon said earlier this year.

In Live Another Day, the drone-warrior president is James Heller (played by William Devane), who served as Secretary of Defense under two Republican presidents, and first appeared in season four. (Devane also played the President of the United States in The Dark Knight Rises.) During the fourth season of 24, Heller criticizes Michael Moore, and later signs off on the torture of his gay, anti-American son on suspicions that he’s in contact with Muslim extremists.

Watch the new 24: Live Another Day trailer here:

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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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