Mother Jones 

Mother Jones (MoJo) is a progressive magazine and website, and yet, when it came to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US presidential election, they were one of the more consistently critical publications.

They kicked things off in 2015 by digging into Sanders’ 40-year-old writings (when he was in his 20s), highlighting anything that could be scandalized, and wrapped it up by calling him a con man. No, that was not enough, even after Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton and began campaigning on her behalf, Mother Jones titled: “Don’t Hate Millennials. Save It For Bernie Sanders.”

In fairness, most of those stories were written by one of MoJo’s most prolific commentators, Kevin Drum, who on the other end filed stories like “Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy”, “Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians”, and “New Email Dump Reveals That Hillary Clinton Is Honest and Boring”.

I personally don’t see much value in a progressive news source engaging in trivial commentary to elevate an establishment candidate running, literally, a billion-dollar campaign, while belittling and dismissing her progressive opponent. It’s after half a dozen such stories that I stopped paying attention to MoJo for a while.

But one shouldn’t assess a news source based on the work of a single contributor. Other parts of MoJo did break more critical stories, such as “Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger: It’s Personal. Very Personal.” and “Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Problem”, both by David Corn. That’s the same man who broke the story “SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters” during the 2012 election, arguably the most influential single story in that campaign.

The currently featured investigations include a four-month undercover report about a private prison that MoJo rightly compares to Nellie Bly’s pioneering work in the 19th century to uncover abuses in New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum. This is the kind of journalism that’s incredibly hard to find and deserves kudos.

In other words, while I sometimes would wish for more depth and rigor, and less participation in rationalizing the status quo, it would be unfair to not acknowledge that MoJo is still a pretty remarkable publication that can pack a punch. I’m not a subscriber or donor, but I do read it from time to time.

The Foundation for National Progress is the nonprofit behind Mother Jones magazine, with a pretty diverse funding model that includes grants, subscriptions, donations and advertising. As of 2012, ads made up only 13% of the overall revenue.