Letter to Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Mother Jones asking for Retractions and Corrections in the Reporting of Kiera Butler

To the attention of Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein:

I am writing to you on behalf of the Honest Media Project. On December 12, we published a report covering multiple inaccuracies that Mother Jones has published from your senior editor Kiera Butler who focuses on “disinformation.” A few hours after publishing the report and posting it on X (formerly Twitter), Butler blocked our account clearly indicating she does not wish to dialogue in regard to the issues we have with her reporting.

There are a number of corrections and retractions we are requesting be made to Butler’s work at Mother Jones. Please contact us so we can discuss the numerous distortions and inaccuracies we uncovered in her work. Read the article we published on Butler to have full context as to why we are asking for the following corrections and retractions to her reporting. 

Our requests include:

1. Retract or change the headline, “Anti-vaxxers Have a Dangerous New Conspiracy Theory Called “Natural Immunity”” as there is nothing conspiratorial about the scientific fact of natural immunity.

2. Publish a clarification to Butler’s “prebunk” where she asserts that there is no reason to question COVID shots being given to American children.

3. In Butler’s piece “Pro-Putin Disinformation on Ukraine Is Thriving in Online Anti-vaxx Groups” we ask you to note Ben Dubow is repeatedly referenced, and his work relied on the now-thoroughly debunked Hamilton 68 dashboard. Reporter Matt Taibbi has definitively shown Hamilton 68 was not tracking Russian disinfo, but was in fact a disinfo operation itself.

4. In Butler’s piece “RFK Jr. Wants to Make it Easier for Doctors to Spread Medical Lies” please publish an update that the law Butler defended has been repealed by the very man who signed it into law in the first place, Governor Gavin Newsom, as it is clear to everyone the law was unconstitutional.

5. Retract or change the title of Butler’s reporting on the Trucker Convoy in America titled, “All the US Convoy Extremists Need Now Are Some Actual Truckers.” The piece doesn’t even make a compelling case that the protests ever lacked truckers, and we provide many examples of why this headline is blatantly false.

Since the publication of our report, people have reached out to us with other inaccuracies in Ms. Butler’s reporting, but we will leave it here for now. We assume that Mother Jones does not want distortions or inaccuracies to remain in your publication, especially from a senior editor who defines herself as a professional who “covers the proliferation of mis- and disinformation.” Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Michael Kane

Managing Editor, The Honest Media Project

Sent by email on December 21, 2023, at 10:51 am (ET)