Food, Chemical Industries Not Well Pleased With MoJo Reporting

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The American Council on Science and Health has teamed up with Real Clear Science to rate science journalism. What scientific technique did they use to do this?

Our assessments were based off more than fifteen years of shared experience aggregating quality science content. We tried our best to disegard our own ideological biases to evaluate the sources based on our chosen criteria (more on that below), presenting evidence to back our claims. We placed all the selected sites onto a grid and moved them around over the course of a week’s worth of discussions. After eight iterations, here are the results.

….Notable bottom feeders in science include The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, INFO WARS, and Food Babe. Read these sites only if you want to reinforce your comfortable cocoon of pseudoscientific hokum.

Goodness. They don’t seem to think very highly of Mother Jones. Let’s take a look at the infographic:

Jeez, we’re not even as good as Fox News, which rates better than the New York Times on the quality of its reporting. Does this seem a wee bit unlikely to you? Well, the Real Clear empire is a conservative outfit, while ACSH was initially a Scaife-funded group which then branched out to oil companies and other industry groups. Under the circumstances, I suppose it’s only natural that they’d think fairly well of Fox and fairly poorly of us. After all, ACSH has a long history of skepticism toward government regulation of food and chemicals, while we have a long history of skepticism toward the food and chemical industries that have worked tirelessly over the decades to manufacture doubt about any attempt to cut into their bottom lines. I guess we’re natural enemies.

But I wonder what they think about lead and crime?

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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