This column is adapted from a letter originally sent by Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein to Mother Jones readers and supporters.
“This again??” I thought when I read the Washington Post’s October 23 editorial. The piece is a solid look at the new wave of political campaign literature dressed up as local newspapers. But a few paragraphs in, it delivered what felt like a gut punch:
“People know more or less what they’re getting when they tune in to Fox News or open up a copy of Mother Jones. These institutions’ primary purpose is to make money by putting out news, and they don’t profess in their very name to be independent.”
Fox News and Mother Jones have nothing in common except an “o” as the second letter in our names, but that’s never stopped a pundit looking to make a case that “both right and left do it” by dragging an independent investigative newsroom down to the level of a propaganda network. It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, perhaps because Fox’s descent into conspiracy-laden rhetorical terrorism is nearly complete, but the trope is not dead yet.
To their credit, the Washington Post has since corrected the editorial and removed the reference to Mother Jones. That’s very fair, and this column is a reflection of the broader phenomenon that leads to these knee-jerk references, not a complaint about the Post.
That broader phenomenon is a fundamental mischaracterization of today’s media ecosystem that seeks to position legacy media (such as the Post) in the middle between two equivalent extremes. A pretty classic example came last year, when Axios’ Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild, in an analysis of web traffic to “partisan media,” classed Mother Jones as the “far left” equivalent of Newsmax, while Fox News was categorized as the “right leaning” (that squishy moderate Tucker Carlson!) counterpart to Vox.com’s “left leaning.” Fischer and Rothschild said they’d made the categorizations in consultation with the journalism ratings site NewsGuard—except that NewsGuard rates Mother Jones as “left-leaning” and gives it a green checkmark for fact-based journalism, while Newsmax is rated “conservative” and has a red flag for publishing “false and unsubstantiated” claims.
A similar dig came just a couple of weeks ago from James Bennet, the former editor of the New York Times’ opinion page, who was let go after publishing an op-ed in which Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) urged Donald Trump to deploy the military against Black Lives Matter protesters. In his first public comments since then, Bennet said the Times has “signed up so many new subscribers in the last few years and the expectation of those subscribers is that the Times will be Mother Jones on steroids.” What exactly would “Mother Jones on steroids” mean? Journalism that pulls no punches, on a large scale? A big platform for reporting that calls a lie a lie? Whatever it is, Bennet is offended that anyone would expect such things of the Gray Lady.
It’s funny, but also not, because false equivalence has real consequences. In 2020, we learned that Facebook was worried about changes to its algorithm that were likely to hurt right-wing publishers such as Breitbart and the Daily Wire. To appease them, the social network tweaked the algorithm some more until it could be sure that Mother Jones (singled out by name) was hurt as well. This was doubly ironic since Facebook’s stated goal at the time was to increase the fact-based, quality journalism that people see and decrease partisan screeds: You would have to spend no more than 10 seconds on Mother Jones’ and Breitbart’s feeds to see which is which, but Facebook was not after an honest assessment of journalism, but a performative demonstration of both-sidesism. The result is that, ever since those algorithm changes were made in 2018, you have seen a lot less of our content in your Facebook feed, even if you chose to follow Mother Jones.
There’s another assumption baked into these false comparisons, made explicit in the Washington Post editorial: Both Fox News and Mother Jones, the piece read, have a “primary purpose to make money by putting out news.” As I beat my head against my desk, I tried to think of a way to explain how rich it is for a for-profit, billionaire owned outlet to accuse a nonprofit newsroom of being in it for the money. But my brilliant coworkers were already all over it.
“People don’t realize this but publishing time intensive, deeply reported thousands of words long investigations on political and corporate malfeasance and racial injustice is all just a scheme to bring in the dough,” deadpanned reporter Ali Breland. “Whoever wrote this op-ed decided to put on their both-sides media criticism hat, but forgot that Mother Jones is a nonprofit, with, unlike Fox News or the Post editorial page, fact-checking,” noted reporter Daniel Friedman.
MoJo alumni chimed in: “Absolutely embarrassing false equivalence from the @washingtonpost editorial board,” tweeted Vox.com climate reporter Rebecca Leber. “Mother Jones deserves an apology (and financial support) for its investigative nonprofit journalism.”
Even international news executives took note: “picture perfect example of false balance,” tweeted Wolfgang Blau, the co-founder of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network.
I’m grateful to the Washington Post for pointing out, in its correction, that Mother Jones is a nonprofit. But what I’m even more grateful for is working for an organization whose purpose is not “to make money by putting out news”—in fact, the opposite—and where, when someone drags out the false-equivalence trope, the audience rallies to explain how wrong that is.
There is an important and legitimate discussion about whether journalists should admit to a point of view. (We all have one, unavoidably—the argument is over how open we are about it.) At Mother Jones, we believe in the “view from somewhere,” in journalism that is fueled by a passion for justice and democracy. Hundreds of thousands of people whose support makes our work possible share that commitment. There are those just as committed to the idea that journalists must keep their own values out of sight. But nothing is gained when that distinction is conflated with the (much more important) difference between truth-seeking and propaganda.
Audiences want to know that difference. Let’s not make it harder for them with lazy both-sidesism.
