“This group of journalists wanted to create a magazine that would do all those things that corporate media wasn’t doing…that would also be beautiful and engaging and cool-looking and something that people wanted to bring into their life,” says CIR CEO Monika Bauerlein.Mother Jones file
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Fifty years ago, in a small San Francisco office above a fast-food restaurant, a handful of plucky journalists started a new magazine. It was a time not that dissimilar from today. Corporations were growing more powerful. Massive social movements were transforming the country. Journalism—under a political microscope following the Watergate scandal—seemed more important than ever. But to the writers and reporters in that tiny office, America’s newsrooms weren’t properly holding politicians and those in power to account. And so, they founded a magazine they hoped would do so and called it Mother Jones.
Over the last half-century, the nonprofit magazine has broken some of the era’s defining stories, including some of the earliest reporting about the dangers of Big Tobacco, its investigation into the exploding Ford Pinto, and Mitt Romney’s now-infamous line about 47 percent of Americans viewing themselves as “victims” who are “dependent on government.”
Monika Bauerlein has been part of Mother Jones’ story for half of its existence, first as an editor and now as the CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, as well as the public radio show Reveal and its sister podcast, More To The Story. “Mother Jones was always kind of at the tip of the firmament for me of an independent, fearless news organization that would tell it like it is,” she says.
On this week’s More To The Story, Bauerlein joins host Al Letson to look back at the magazine’s Bay Area origin story. Plus, they examine how the politics of the 1970s are strikingly similar to today and look forward to what the next 50 years holds for independent nonprofit news in the US.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
