Many people in the news business recognize by now that American democracy could be lost within years. And still so much of political reporting feels like business as usual. 2022 is a chance to change this. Before it’s too late. motherjones.com/media/2021/12/… (Don't take it from me. “The insurrection, the gerrymandering, the voter suppression, the attacks on professional election officials—all of this puts our democracy at risk to a degree we have not seen since the Civil War. That’s how serious this is.” —@EricHolder to @AriBerman)

1/The Facebook whistleblower's revelations have been vital. But a lot of the conversation about the platform fueling "division" is missing one thing. This is not a both-sides story, a much as we want it to be. The rage and disinformation are not equally distributed. 2/It’s not that conservatives are somehow inherently more likely to be misinformed. We all think we know stuff that we don’t. But conservative Americans have for decades been targeted by a vast propaganda machine that profits from enraging them.

.@ClaraJeffery and I dug into what exactly is behind reports that Facebook tweaked its algorithm to improve results for conservative publishers and make them worse for Mother Jones. And... wow. motherjones.com/media/2020/10/… This is enraging for us as journalists, and on behalf of all the MoJo journalists who work super hard to tell important stories in a way that's interesting to audiences—and who nonetheless don't reach the readers they could because Facebook tweaked the dials for political reasons

I'm in a @MotherJones board meeting today so it's going to take a while to fully process this infuriating news, but just briefly (because YOU, as a news consumer, should be furious): wsj.com/articles/how-m… At the time that this happened, Facebook claimed it was reducing the prevalence of "low-quality" news in users' feeds. Seems a reasonable goal. But guess what? When they did that, it turned out to hurt low-quality news from right-wing propaganda outlets. So what did they do?

I don't think people have fully grappled with what coronavirus is doing to journalism, in part because a few big orgs are still doing well. But the immune system of democracy is literally crashing before our eyes. motherjones.com/media/2020/05/… And it's not because the internet happened, or any of the other facile explanations. It's a lot simpler and more infuriating than that. One word: Greed. Two words: Hedge funds.

There's a German word, Steigbügelhalter (stirrup holder), that describes helping someone come to power, but has been specifically applied to politicians who use the mantle of respectability to aid and abet authoritarianism. This may well describe what happened in Washington today. But it's global, too. Back in Germany, the mainstream conservative and libertarian parties just collaborated with the far-right AfD to oust the socialist who'd won a regional election. theguardian.com/world/2020/feb…