Mother Jones

What you're reading

Mother Jones is a nonprofit investigative magazine founded in 1976 in San Francisco, named for the labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones. It is published by the Foundation for National Progress and runs as a bimonthly print magazine plus a continuously updated website, the daily MoJo Reader newsletter, and the long-running Mother Jones podcast. Coverage centers on national politics, money in politics, climate change, criminal justice, gun policy, voting rights, corporate accountability, and the conservative legal and political movements.

The magazine has broken major national stories — David Corn's 2012 publication of the Mitt Romney "47 percent" video, sustained investigative work on the Trump campaign's Russia contacts, the Trayvon Martin coverage, the long-running "Crisis Inside the NRA" series, and the climate-disinformation reporting on the fossil-fuel industry. It has won multiple National Magazine Awards. Audience is national, skews progressive and engaged, and runs from professional politics-watchers to general readers who want long-form investigative journalism. Print circulation is small but the digital reach is substantial, and the magazine is regularly cited by other national outlets.

Ownership & funding

Foundation for National Progress (nonprofit). Funded primarily through nonprofit + subscription.

Nonprofit-plus-subscription funding removes most advertiser pressure and the quarterly-earnings demands that shape commercial magazines. There is a paywall, but the model leans heavily on member donations and foundation grants, which means coverage can support multi-month investigations that would not pencil out at a commercial magazine. The trade-offs are real: the donor base is openly progressive and concentrated in coastal philanthropy, which concentrates funder influence and aligns coverage with progressive priorities (climate, voting access, criminal justice, gun control, reproductive rights). The model rewards depth and ambition but also amplifies the publication's editorial identity rather than moderating it.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Mother Jones at Left with a factuality rating of High.

The Left rating reflects Mother Jones's explicit progressive political identity and the topic mix it has chosen for nearly five decades. Coverage centers conservative political movements, corporate power, the fossil-fuel industry, the gun lobby, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, voter-suppression litigation, and the rightward drift of the Supreme Court. Framing of those subjects is critical and the magazine does not pretend otherwise. Sourcing leans on progressive advocacy groups, public-interest lawyers, labor unions, climate scientists, and Democratic officials. Trump-administration and post-Trump conservative-movement coverage is investigative and adversarial.

Where Mother Jones breaks the pattern is its willingness to criticize Democratic incumbents, progressive movements, and left-aligned institutions when documents warrant it. The magazine has filed adverse stories on Democratic congressional leadership, on progressive nonprofits' financial conflicts, on EV-industry labor abuses despite the climate-policy alignment, and on Biden-administration immigration policy from the left. The High factuality rating tracks Mother Jones's investigative discipline: corrections are flagged, anonymous sources are stood up independently, document trails are linked or embedded, and the magazine has won major-publication awards for stories that survived hostile legal scrutiny. The Left bias is unambiguous and openly declared — what distinguishes Mother Jones from less rigorous outlets is that the bias is in topic emphasis and conclusion framing, not in factual distortion. Read it knowing the perspective.

Editorial vs news side

Mother Jones is a magazine of investigative reporting plus commentary, and it does not pretend to have a centrist news desk separated from a progressive editorial page. The investigative features are reported and documented; the political commentary, columns, and analysis pieces are progressive and openly so. There is no single editorial-board endorsement function the way a daily paper has, but the publication's institutional voice is consistent across reporting and analysis. The Left rating applies to the publication as a whole — what you are reading is committed progressive journalism, and that is the product.

Why we include them in nwsly

Investigative left; politics and corporate-accountability beats.

Mother Jones files the longest-running progressive investigative work in American journalism and routinely breaks national stories that the daily-paper press picks up only after publication. nwsly pulls it for the investigations — corporate-accountability work, climate-disinformation reporting, money-in-politics, conservative-movement coverage — that no Center-rated outlet in our lineup produces at the same depth. The Left rating is unambiguous to readers, which means the perspective is legible up front, and the factual record is strong enough that the reporting holds up under scrutiny. We cite the investigations, not the daily political commentary.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Mother Jones

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