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MoJo Reader, I’m interrupting your day because I’d like you to read this message our CEO Monika Bauerlein sent out a few days ago. I think she nailed it when she criticized media baron Jeff Bezos for bending the knee to Donald Trump and wrote about the threat Big Tech poses to journalism. (I appreciated that she quoted from a piece I wrote on the same topic that I don’t want you to miss either.) What it comes down to is this: Too many outlets and too many voices in the media are trying to accommodate Trump or cover him as a normal politician. That will only help him consolidate power and continue his assault on the rule of law, democracy, and decency. My colleagues and I at Mother Jones aren’t here to be a partisan players. But we are here to serve the truth, without fear and with fervor. And here’s the bottom line: We can only do that because of the support we receive from readers like you. Donate Now

MoJo Reader, It wasn’t enough for Jeff Bezos to yank the Washington Post’s already written endorsement of Kamala Harris, just weeks ahead of the November election. It wasn’t enough for him to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory (not days, not hours, but minutes after the official call) or to trek to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. It wasn’t enough for him to donate $1 million to the president’s inauguration, or to declare that he was “optimistic” about the second term of a man he had once called a danger to democracy. It wasn’t even enough for his company to pay $40 million for a documentary (air quotes) about Melania Trump, with a reported $28 million going to the First Lady directly. No, Bezos had to make an even grander gesture: Last week, he announced (on Elon Musk’s X, of course) that the Post’s opinion section henceforth would publish only articles “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” And, just to hit you over the head with it, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” My colleague David Corn had it right in his piece on Big Tech’s war on journalism: “As Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg suck up to an autocrat to preserve and expand their own profits, they are imperiling journalism and helping democracy die, not in darkness, but in the clear light of day and within the glow of their oligarchic power.” Here at Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means it’s incredibly hard to muster the resources to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. So please make a gift today and know that our team is out there working hard to uncover what powerful people don’t want you to know. Donate Now Of course, it’s not at all new or unusual for a newspaper owner to put his thumb on the scale of the opinion pages. They have that privilege, and historically have used it—sometimes heavy-handedly, sometimes a little more subtly. Nor is it unusual for a man who built his fortune on the backs of workers who have to pee in the back of their trucks to not see the complexity of a term like “personal liberty.” A guy who thanks those same workers (and all of us customers, who likewise had no say in the matter) for rocketing him into space doesn’t worry about such trifling contradictions. What is stunning is the rapidity with which Bezos is abasing himself before Trump. The Post killed a panel, by its longtime cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, that showed Bezos laying a sack of money at the foot of a Trump throne, but in fact Bezos has easily outdone her satire in just a few weeks. And the painful thing is, he didn’t need to. Bezos obviously has more money than God, his companies are humming, and he can afford all the space trips and cringe Annie Leibovitz photo shoots he wants. Sure, Trump can retaliate, but Bezos got through the entire first Trump term without this sort of sycophancy. In fact, up until October 2024, his ownership of the Post seemed pretty in sync with his promise, back when he bought more than a decade earlier, that “the values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.” The values of the Post, as it happens, already included its editorial pages advocating for “personal liberties and free markets”— you’d be hard pressed finding an opinion piece they’ve published that argues against those things. (In fact, the Post’s Dana Milbank very effectively skewered Bezos’ directive by noting that “the single greatest threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets’ in the United States today” is none other than President Donald Trump.) If Bezos wanted to reaffirm the Post’s opinion section’s libertarian bent, he could easily have given that direction to the editors he hired. But he did not do that. What he did was make a public spectacle of his diktat to the paper. It was a performance, with an audience of one, or maybe two (though I doubt Bezos really cares about impressing Elon Musk, who nonetheless felt moved to tweet “Bravo @JeffBezos” because he loves a boss-as-dictator flex). Back when Bezos bought the Post (the same year eBay founder Pierre Omidyar announced he was sinking $250 million into his own media venture), I remember having a lot of conversations that started with something like “so what’s the case for Mother Jones at this point?” If billionaires were investing in journalism, why go on struggling to keep a perennially cash-strapped nonprofit investigative newsroom alive? The answer is pretty stark now. Billionaire investment can enable some great journalism, as the Post has demonstrated over the years, but the only thing that guarantees independence is independence. That’s why Mother Jones relies on support from an incredible community of readers (and listeners to our sister radio show, Reveal) who support our reporting with a few dollars a month or a year, through a subscription or a donation. That way, no one person can ever tell us what to say. So thank you—and if you’re not yet subscribing in print or donating to support this work, please consider doing it now, in honor of Jeff Bezos. Donate Now

Onward, Monika Bauerlein, CEO Mother Jones

P.S. This is already proving to be an enormously challenging year, but knowing that you have our backs makes it possible for us to face it confidently. The proud community of MoJo donors shows that there is a way to sustain journalism without billionaire owners who kiss the ring in Mar-a-Lago. My hope is that you’ll join those ranks today.

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