YouTube: Reality Show Contestants Aren’t Here to Make Friends

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Sometimes it’s the simplest video cut-ups that are the most effective, and here’s another one of those “wish I’d thought of it” clips. Via the blog FourFour, it’s a montage of reality show competitors (see how many you can name, kids!) insisting they’re not interested in attaining any level of chumminess with their fellow contestants. Sure, I knew I’d heard that statement a few times on TV, but not this much:

After a while, the continual repetition starts to seem more like a desperate effort at convincing themselves than us. But they’re right, “this is not America’s Next Top… uh, Best Friend” (my favorite moment of that whole clip). Therefore, consider me inspired. I’ve decided to adopt this attitude from now on, and so to all you sassy commenters (and Mother Jones employees who find my presence on your hallowed web pages offensive): I didn’t come to the Riff to make friends! I came here to, uh, write about French techno, I guess. And win the million dollars. I get a million dollars for this, right?

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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.

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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.”

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