“But lots of politicians lie,” you might say, and it’s true. Richard Nixon did to cover up a program of dirty tricks, Bill Clinton to hide affairs, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to start a war, and let’s not even talk about political ads. But those deceptions are generally about spinning or hiding the facts, not about inventing things out of whole cloth. They generally have a kernel of truth.
Trump does not care about kernels of truth—which is why his lies are such a great fit for entertainment media. “They are eating the cats, they are eating the dogs” is a zombie show, not a campaign speech. Housing policy just can’t compete.
And thus, during this campaign, traditional media often gave in to the banality of crazy. Trump would claim that schools were secretly performing gender surgery on kids, and the newspaper of record would note that he “charmed” a group of conservative moms. His evident cognitive decline barely registered in the headlines.
Less than two weeks before the election, the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post spiked their editors’ endorsements of Kamala Harris. Within hours after the race was called, WaPo owner Jeff Bezos congratulated the president-elect on his “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook followed the same day.
This is not just Fox News, Twitter trolls, and Facebook grifters anymore. The right has moved from creating a parallel news ecosystem to integrating itself into all the places where people scroll, click, and stream. And their power to do that is only growing as media owners make their accommodations with the incoming administration. Tech executives want minimal regulation; news leaders know a vindictive president has many ways to hit their pocketbooks (as he is trying to do with multiple lawsuits right now). Traditional media will continue to do invaluable reporting, but journalists in those newsrooms are already being warned not to be too antagonistic to Trump.
So is it over for a democracy that relies on people having access to truth?
Hell no. America has been through dark times before, including times when journalists were thrown in jail and publishers driven out of business. People around the world have shown that you can defy liars and propagandists. In Poland last year, a Trump-like autocrat was defeated after eight years, despite a campaign full of disinformation about immigrants, the pandemic, and LGBTQ rights. Brazilians in 2022 were flooded with hate and disinformation and nonetheless threw out Jair Bolsonaro.
Change like that requires long, unglamorous, grinding work that sometimes ends in a gut punch. It means doing things that feel uncomfortable, that others aren’t doing, or that could flop.
Here at Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, we’re doing our own part of that. We aim to provide a reliable alternative to corporate, billionaire-owned, and compliant media—one that reaches people in those same feeds where they are targeted by lies and propaganda. That’s why we’ve been focused on bringing rock-solid reporting to places where people don’t usually find it, including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. We’re expanding our podcast offering to create counterpoints to the Joe Rogans of the world. We even bring our stories to television, Hulu, and Netflix.
But believe me: That all costs a lot of money that is hard to come by. We don’t have a billionaire sugar daddy or a corporate owner. We raise 70 percent of our budget from individual supporters, and this time of the year always means losing sleep, because I never know how we’ll piece together a budget for the coming year that maintains a team of the bravest, toughest reporters anywhere. I wouldn’t be urgently asking for your donations if it didn't really matter. Every dollar counts, so please make a gift today.
Because we can push back on the lies, but only if we do it together.
With appreciation and resolve,
