Hi Mother Jones Reader, 

When I was a baby reporter, 60 Minutes and Mother Jones were the brightest stars in the investigative journalism sky. The work they did—fearless, unrelenting, dedicated to exposing abuses of power and corruption wherever they were found—was what I aspired to do. Or so I thought.

What I didn’t know then was that while these two newsrooms had a lot in common, there was one difference that would end up meaning everything. 60 Minutes, of course, was part of CBS, which over the past 30 years has been part of multiple megacorporations including Westinghouse, Viacom, and Paramount, and whose most recent acquisition left it in the warm embrace of Silicon Valley nepo baby David Ellison. Mother Jones, on the other hand, was part of—nothing. It is an independent nonprofit newsroom, owned by no one, supported by and accountable only to its audience.

Before I go any further: Last month, we ran our Summer Membership Drive, and readers rallied to raise $120,000 (!!). Wow. More than 2,600 of you joined our fight for the truth by making a donation. We’re grateful.

But the fact is we had a lofty goal that we didn’t reach: $200,000. And while I don’t love sending another note about fundraising, I do love being able to cover every story that comes our way—so let me make this quick pitch: Please don’t keep us sweating this summer. If you can, support our work with a donation of any amount.

But back to that difference between newsrooms: I didn’t know this at the time, nor would I have cared. Why would ownership matter, so long as the journalists got paid? And speaking of getting paid, 60 Minutes correspondents were compensated in the millions, had fleets of producers at their disposal, and could jet around the globe to pursue stories. MoJo journalists would at times couchsurf or hop freight trains. That nonprofit life seemed to be no picnic.

But I soon learned there were some other differences. One of the biggest stories of the 1990s, when I was cutting my teeth as a reporter, was the revelation that tobacco companies were hiding evidence that their product was addictive. 60 Minutes got hold of a hell of a story in 1996, when producer Lowell Bergmann interviewed a tobacco industry whistleblower who revealed that the companies actually worked to make cigarettes more addictive. But CBS’ lawyers killed the interview (an incident that ended up inspiring The Insider, one of the better reporter movies out there).

Several other outlets ultimately published the allegations, and CBS ended up broadcasting the whistleblower interview months later. But the message was clear. The suits at corporate could muzzle the nation’s premier investigative team.

At the time, this episode was viewed as an outlier. CBS had recently been purchased by energy giant Westinghouse, but in general corporate leadership still seemed to believe that it had a reputation to uphold, and journalistic independence was part of that.

It would take another 30 years for that idea to officially go out the window. By 2025, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was trying to sell itself to the billionaire Ellison family, a sale that needed the Trump administration’s approval. But Trump was mad at CBS because of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. So Paramount’s owner paid him off with a $16 million lawsuit settlement, asked CBS leaders to hold off on making the president mad again until the sale went through, and pocketed $2.4 billion from the Ellisons.

The new owner, David Ellison, had a different philosophy about interfering with the newsroom: Instead of sending signals behind the scenes, he would be quite public about it. First, Ellison installed Bari Weiss, the founder of the conservative-leaning newsletter startup The Free Press and someone with no experience in TV, let alone running a global newsroom, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Ten days later, the network’s standards chief, charged with ensuring accuracy and editorial independence, was gone. Two months after that, Weiss spiked a 60 Minutes report on conditions at the Trump administration’s favorite torture prison, El Salvador’s CECOT, demanding more airtime for Trump’s spokespeople. Like the tobacco story decades ago, the CECOT story ultimately aired—but this time, the message was even clearer.

Just in case anyone missed it, though, Weiss made things even more plain another few months later, when she fired a string of 60 Minutes veterans, including the executive producer, the executive editor (whom, comically, CBS reportedly tried to rehire just a few days later), and two correspondents: Sharyn Alfonsi, who had reported the CECOT story, and Cecilia Vega, who had a story about immigration enforcement in Minneapolis in the same broadcast. That led to a heartbreaking scene at an all-team meeting, where Scott Pelley—the only remaining correspondent who happened to be in town—demanded to know why Weiss was “murdering” the show and appointing a new executive producer, Nick Bilton, also with no TV news experience. Three days later, Pelley was fired.

And with that, the huge difference between my two journalism idols was made abundantly, and intentionally, clear: 60 Minutes was not an independent newsroom. Its journalistic freedom ended at the C-suite door.

I wish I could say that this left me feeling vindicated, because my career path took me to Mother Jones instead of CBS News or another billionaire-owned outlet. And of course I couldn’t be more proud to work here, or more convinced that independence, nonprofit status, and being accountable only to our audience is the only way out of the mess that journalism finds itself in. But it’s miserable seeing another of America’s powerful democratic institutions throw principle to the wind. A spine is a terrible thing to waste.

To be sure, legacy newsrooms are under a lot of pressure. The great reporting that CBS and 60 Minutes produced over the decades was brought to us by a business model—sandwiching editorial content in between the ads that pay the bills—that is circling the drain. That’s one reason corporate owners are feeling less and less inclined to tolerate reporting that endangers their political or economic bottom line. Because news is a tiny fraction of their business, they are more inclined to treat the news division as a bone they can toss to a press-hating president.

So what about the alternate model—the nonprofit route? It’s not easy over here either. At Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, our budget is about 0.86 percent of Paramount’s expected $30 billion in revenue, and we sweat bullets for every one of those dollars—because they come from people like you, tens of thousands of them, to whom we have to prove year after year that ferociously independent reporting is worth what amounts to a few bucks a month.

And for 50 years—yes, this year is Mother Jones’ 50th birthday!—we have. Remember how this story started with CBS getting cold feet about Big Tobacco? Mother Jones has published investigations of the tobacco industry pretty much going back to our founding in 1976—our cover story in January 1979 was an investigation of just how addictive smoking was, and not long after the 60 Minutes debacle we published a cover story detailing Big Tobacco’s relationship with the presidential campaign of Republican Bob Dole.

But we do have to figure out how to keep it all going, and in the absence of David Ellison’s riches, there’s only one way to do it: You. A basic Paramount subscription costs $8.99 a month. And granted, for that you get Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Survivor, but if you were to become a donor to Mother Jones and our sister radio show, Reveal (which you should add to your podcast queue right now), you would make 1,000 times the difference. Because thanks to you, our reporters can expose wrongdoing, shine a light on corruption, bring out the things powerful people want hidden—and most of all, no suit in a corner office can tell them to stop.

Onward,
Monika Bauerlein, CEO
The Center for Investigative Reporting
Mother Jones