The very act of journalism—reporting, investigating, holding power to account—has never seemed more vital, or more challenged, than it does today. I don’t need to sit here and list all the ways the Trump administration has waged battle against journalism itself. But sometimes, when simply reporting the facts feels like a struggle, it’s helpful—to me at least—to look back. Because in many ways, it’s always been a struggle.
Fifty years ago, a plucky group of journalists in San Francisco looked at newsrooms around the US and thought: We need something different. The country was changing in dramatic ways. And they thought that much of journalism back then wasn’t properly speaking truth to power or holding corporations accountable for their actions. So inside a small office above a fast-food restaurant, they started a new magazine: Mother Jones. It was meant as an antidote to corporate media, a newsroom that would capture the true extent of the transformational political and cultural changes happening in the 1970s.
This year, Mother Jones is celebrating its 50th anniversary as an independent nonprofit magazine and is now part of a larger newsroom, the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces our public radio show, Reveal, and our weekly interview podcast, More To The Story (both hosted by yours truly). So I thought this would be a nice opportunity to bring on CIR’s CEO (and my boss), Monika Bauerlein.
We talked about what Mother Jones’ founders initially wanted to name their new magazine (New Dimensions, anyone?), as well as some of the magazine’s defining stories (exploding Pintos!). But we also look at how this current moment echoes that same era of transformation post-Watergate. Journalism has always had its challenges. But the truth is a hard thing to bottle up. Fifty years of Mother Jones—and hopefully 50 more—proves it.
—Al Letson
