February 26, 2007

Al Gore Wins! And This Time Gets To Keep the Prize

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Okay, so I get that awards shows are going political. First the Dixie Chicks run the table for standing up to Bush, then tonight’s Al Gore show at the Oscars.

To sum up:

-Leonardo DiCaprio with Al early on, together they announce that the Oscars has gone totally green, carbon neutral, pats on the back all around.

-Leo then turns to Al in appreciation, asks him if he doesn’t have any sort of announcement to share with his international audience. Gore pulls out a paper and starts to lead into an “I’ve decided to…” when the Oscar score interrupts him, all part of the script.

-Melissa Etheridge wins for best song (“I Need to Wake Up”) for Inconvenient Truth, thanks her wife, tells us how it’s not about Democrats and Republicans, red and blue, that we are all green and says what a hero Gore is.

-Minutes later Inconvenient Truth wins for best documentary and the director thanks Gore for (and I am paraphrasing here, didn’t have the reporters notebook handy) “letting us do this film 30 years in the making.” Gore grabs the statue, feels quite at home on the Hollywood stage and uses his time wisely, tells America that its not too late, that we can change the course of our planet’s future, but not without action from a passive administration. Something like that.

So, like I said, I get that Hollywood likes to reach out and grab their courageous ones by the tie, or in last year’s case by the cowboy hat, but then they have to go all soft and give The Departed the best motion picture nod? (They had already given the oft-snubbed Scorsese the Best Director win, so that’s not an excuse.) I may be in the minority here but in my opinion Little Miss Sunshine and Babel (the only other two I saw) both ran circles around the mob film propped up by a ridiculously-flush cast. Maybe it was Alec Baldwin’s line about unwarranted wiretapping that grabbed the academy? When his police team is listening in on a deal going down he squeals, “The Patriot Act! I love it, I love the Patriot Act!”

Yeah, probably not.

I know these award shows matter little, and it’s Hollywood so what do I expect, but it irks me that they take a serious tone, responsible tone, all political and progressive by theme, and then throw it all down the Charles River before the night is through.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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