Campaign Reporters Hate Everyone

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Who gets the most positive campaign coverage? Vox asked Crimson Hexagon, a social media software analytics company, to run the numbers, and the answer is John Kasich. Who gets the most negative coverage? Hillary Clinton.

No surprise there, I suppose. As usual, though, I’d caution against making very much out of this. For starters, there’s not a lot of difference between the candidates. And sometimes there’s just bad news to report. I think that Hillary has been the target of some poor reporting on her email problems, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was bound to get a lot of negative coverage no matter what. That’s life.

The chart on the right shows net coverage (positive minus negative) for all five of the remaining candidates, and the most telling statistic is that campaign coverage is just overwhelmingly negative, full stop. On average, each of the candidates received about 5 percent positive coverage and 35 percent negative coverage. It’s no wonder that everyone thinks they’re treated uniquely badly by the press. They obsess over the fact that they (really and truly) get overwhelmingly bad coverage, without realizing that everyone else does too. Apparently campaign reporters just hate the idea of writing anything positive about anybody.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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