Facts are facts. And this is a problem.

Why I need you to support Mother Jones at this moment.   [Mother Jones + The Center for Investigative Reporting]( MoJo Reader, After all my years of reporting—which includes the research for my book American Psychosis—it’s still hard for me to believe we’re living through this political moment when so much of our vital national discourse is untethered to the truth. And for me, a crucial question is this: What can the media do when a pressing threat to American democracy is fueled by so much misinformation and baseless beliefs? I examined this in [a recent issue of Our Land](, my personal newsletter, and it’s what I’d like to discuss with you, as I interrupt your day to make a request: Can you please [support Mother Jones with a much-needed donation right away](? The team and I need your help. Our fundraising folks, who work tremendously hard to keep Mother Jones going strong, tell me we need to raise a whopping $230,000 in the next 10 days. Otherwise, we might come up short in the funding required [to support our kick-ass reporting]( in the final months of this make-or-break election. Put simply, we need a [surge in giving]( beginning today. I’m sure you know that I’d rather be reporting up a storm than asking you to send us your hard-earned bucks. But my team of reporters and I could not do what we do—we could not report on the people, groups, and forces threatening our nation—were it not for readers like you who give a damn about what’s happening and understand the need for journalism that exposes and highlights the dangers at hand. Unfortunately, many in the media don’t do this. As I write in “[America Is Broken, and the Media Ain’t Helping](,” that’s a huge problem. Here’s how I put it: I try not to get wound up about polls. Asking people what they might do in six months is somewhat useful but not necessarily determinative in a close contest. But what is worth following are polls that show us how voters are thinking about the world—which is something the media is supposed to help with. And a recent Politico-Morning Consult [poll]( asked respondents which presumptive presidential nominee “has done more to promote infrastructure improvements and job creation.” Forty percent said Biden, 37 percent Donald Trump—a virtual tie. (Twelve percent said the two men had done the same.) This showed much of America is ignorant or willfully wrong. Biden successfully pushed for a bipartisan bill that yielded [$1 trillion]( in infrastructure investments to bolster bridges, roads, transit systems, and more. Trump, when he was in the White House, declared “Infrastructure Week” several times and ended up passing nothing. It even became a joke about his administration. Yeah, another Infrastructure Week, Trump in a truck blowing the horn. So the score: 1,000,000,000,000 to zero. Yet half the public does not know or understand that—or won’t admit it. Likewise, Biden has outscored Trump on job creation. In [the first three years]( of their respective presidencies, more than 14 million jobs were created during Biden’s administration, and 6 million were created during Trump’s (pre-Covid) stint. In this comparison, Biden does benefit from the post-pandemic rebound. Still, facts are facts (unless they’re alternative facts). In another question in this poll, a decisive majority (61 percent) said they believe the economy today is much or somewhat worse than it was four years ago—that’s when the economy was in a freefall because of the pandemic that Trump was mismanaging. There are plenty of possible explanations. Again, the persistent trauma caused by the post-pandemic inflation. Or maybe the tendency of people to regard the past more positively than the present. Objects in the rearview mirror may look better than they were. (George W. Bush, who launched a misguided war that caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and that destabilized the Middle East, left office with a dismal 34 percent approval rating. In 2018, 61 percent of Americans had a favorable view of him.) Whatever the reason, many Americans are misjudging present and recent realities. Are some doing so because they fancy Trump and thus accept the false information he peddles? Or do they support Trump because they hold mistaken beliefs about basic matters? It might be a bit of a chicken-and-egg dynamic. In any event, too many don’t have their facts straight. That’s a problem. This is yet another indication that our political-media system is broken. Not that we needed another sign of that. The embrace by millions of Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to the machinations of the Deep State, the media, Democrats, voting machine companies, and foreign adversaries (China! Venezuela!) was proof the system was kaput. A January [poll]( showed that 30 percent of Americans still say Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Folks who believe Biden conspired to steal the election are unlikely to credit him with doing better on infrastructure policy or job creation than Trump. But there are many beyond this group whose views also are not tethered to reality. That’s obviously a problem for democracy. If voters do not possess good information, they are less likely to render good decisions. Pondering this, I thought about the recent [interview]( Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, gave to Ben Smith, the editor of the online outlet Semafor. Smith began by asking Kahn why the Times does not see its job as stopping an authoritarian—that would be Trump—from taking power. Putting the question that way allowed Kahn the easy out of proclaiming the importance of an independent media, and he replied, “To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote—that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.” The challenge for the media now is not whether to become a mouthpiece for Biden, but how to structure its coverage to meet the urgency of the moment. Though Kahn in this interview insisted that his paper has fully covered Biden’s infrastructure bill and other legislative accomplishments, it has pounded the issue of his age, focused overly on the horse-race elements of the presidential contest, and not consistently highlighted Trump’s authoritarian impulses and excesses (while at times publishing important pieces on this). I don’t want to pick on the Times, and in these days of fractured media, one newspaper, even the most important one in the nation, certainly is not responsible for shaping all public attitudes about Biden, Trump, and the world. Yet I noticed in Kahn’s remarks an unwillingness to acknowledge that this is a particularly difficult or perilous time and that standard practices might need a rethinking. It’s fine to declare the value of independent media that entails, as he put it, “hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.” Back to the question I started with: What is the media to do when a threat to democracy is being fueled by so much misinformation and baseless beliefs? Is covering both sides in the same standard fashion sufficient? If a third of American voters or so are stuck in Trump’s false reality—believing that he won in 2020, that his economy was the best ever, and that he’s a brilliant and honest leader—there’s not much that mainstream media coverage can do to change that. But the existence of this lost-in-Trump America makes it more crucial for major journalistic outlets to steadily provide for the other two-thirds a clear picture of the Biden-Trump comparison and what’s at stake. Trump and his autocratic crusade benefits from misinformed voters. The fight for the nation’s democratic future depends on decreasing the size of that portion of the electorate. [And with your help](, we can get people the information they need to make informed decisions. If you can right now, please [support Mother Jones and our truth-telling journalism](. We have a huge $230,000 gap [to fill]( over the next 10 days. I’m worried about coming up short and not being able to do all the hard-hitting and independent journalism this moment demands. As I noted above, I’d rather be reporting than writing to ask for money. But we face an inescapable reality: We can’t do this reporting that I know you appreciate and respect without [the donations](. So, as the fundraising experts tell me, I’m supposed to repeat this request multiple times. Thus, one last time: I sincerely hope you’ll [help right now when it’s critical]( that we meet our funding needs to address the threat at hand. As always, thanks for reading and considering my request. It’s an honor and pleasure for me and my team to work for you and all our readers and supporters. Sincerely, David Corn Washington, DC, Bureau Chief Mother Jones [Donate](   [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Donate Monthly]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. 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