September 16, 2020

CNN’s Brian Stelter Unpacks Fox’s Playbook on the Latest Mother Jones Podcast

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As my colleague Molly Schwartz neatly sums up, the lies, obfuscations, and dizzying talking points of Fox News are bad. Exposing them is good. We’ve known this forever, but it is freshly necessary to corroborate, investigate, and understand the big picture and the small, to see how we got here. In case you missed the steady skewering that Fox and Trump took last week by CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, in conversation with Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, catch it here. With Jeffery’s pinpoint questions, he assesses whether Fox explains Trump or Trump explains Fox, or each explains the other in a dance of propaganda and power trading. He dishes on what Fox insiders told him for his book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. It’s all laid out, the horror and the humor, the madness and the bleakly fascinating details.

“You say that Hoax is essentially about the Foxification of Trump and the Trumpification of Fox,” the conversation begins. “Who leads this dance, the president or the network?” The answer is good. (Back to good-good news tomorrow. Today we welcome, for a midweek lift, good-bad news.) Reach us with personal stories and good-good recharges at recharge@motherjones.com.

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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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