Mother Jones Dark Money

Millions of dollars in donations from unknown sources

*On July 19, we published a correction to this report and have edited the below reporting to reflect the updated information.

***

An in-depth investigation by Honest Media into the funding that supports Mother Jones magazine was only able to account for $7M, or 5.5%, of the $128.2M contributed by individuals and foundations between fiscal years 2011-2023. That leaves a gaping hole of $121.2M that an extensive search of 990 tax filings could not locate.

Where is this money coming from?

Mother Jones, founded in 1975, is run by the Foundation for National Progress (FNP) in San Francisco, a 501(c)3 tax-free charitable organization. Because only three years of 990s are posted on the magazine’s website – and are incomplete at that – we relied on documents provided by the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer to assess the funding sources of this once progressive news outlet, which is now a fervent cheerleader for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). 

According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization that tracks the flow of money in American politics, Mother Jones has, since 2016, received at least $705,416 in advertisements from campaigns of such Democrats as Pete Buttigeg and Martin O’Malley, and to party initiatives that recruit, educate, and train future Democrats to run for office. The National Democratic Training Committee and its allied political action committee, the Democratic Strategy Institute, gave the bulk of that revenue, totaling $273,482, while End Citizens United gave $134,052. 

It would be difficult to find a more nakedly partisan flack than David Corn, the Washington DC bureau chief for Mother Jones. While Mother Jones and Corn purportedly support the effort to repeal Citizens United, Corn’s shrill reportage, as described by Liam Sturgess in the Kennedy Beacon, and the magazine’s donations to establishment Democrats uphold the system that thrives on dark money. And yet, Mother Jones has a history of raising the specter of dark money in everyone else’s politics except the Democrats – and indeed, its very own funding. 

How Honest Media conducted its research

To contextualize our findings, some explanatory background is in order. Over the twelve years of tax filings analyzed, Mother Jones generated a whopping $173.3M in revenue, $45M from a mix of royalties, programs, and investment income. Its yearly operating budget for the period under study averaged $14.4M, growing significantly from 2014-2017 during the rise of Donald Trump.

The questions naturally arise: Who is funding Mother Jones and are they exercising undue influence on its reportage? Over the last twenty years, the magazine’s focus and tone have changed substantially, migrating away from its working-class and environmental advocacy to parroting the messaging and insidious fabrications of the DNC. It continues to carry water for Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate conspiracy while denigrating the populist candidacies of Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr for daring to challenge the party’s apparatchiks and oligarchic gatekeepers.

Identifying the money behind Mother Jones is not easy. Thanks to the structure of the IRS 990 tax return, which is required of all nonprofits, ambiguities and obfuscation are the norm. Analyses of these migraine-inducing documents force researchers to expend large quantities of time to uncover glimmerings of partial truths. 

So Honest Media reached out to Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones.

In a series of email exchanges, we asked for clarification of her organization’s tax returns, but met with a dissembling response, albeit polite and cordial. Bauerlein characterized the magazine’s funding this way: “I can tell you that institutional (foundation) grants represent only about 15 percent of our revenue. More than 250,000 individuals support our work via subscriptions or donations.” By that measure, Mother Jones has received $19.23M, or 15%, of its $128.2M contributions from grants for the period under study. But this figure does not jive with what is reported.

How are 990s analyzed?

The essential components of the 990 are Parts VIII and Schedule B. The first is a simple table that breaks down a nonprofit’s revenue according to several categories, including membership dues, fundraising events, government grants, and “all other contributions.” Mother Jones consistently reports revenue from membership dues, which we surmise is money generated from magazine subscriptions that cost $19.95 annually. We asked Bauerlein twice if the monies reported there are collected from magazine subscriptions, but she chose not to respond. Our hunch is that they are. And this amount is significant because it casts doubt on her assertion that only 15% of Mother Jones’ revenue comes from foundations.

Let’s look at the 990 for 2021 (FY2022), when the organization took in $21.5M in revenue, $17.8M of it from contributors. That year, some $4.4M was collected through “membership dues,” while $11.4M came from “other contributions, gifts, and grants.” By dividing the $19.95 cost of a magazine subscription into $4.4M, we get 220,835 subscribers who provided 38.5% of the contributions reported. So who is responsible for the remaining $11.4M, or 64%, of contributed income?

To find the answer, we turn to Schedule B, “Schedule of Contributors.” Unfortunately, every Schedule B for Mother Jones posted by ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer is stamped “Restricted,” meaning there is no information provided, even though a charitable, tax-exempt organization should have nothing to hide from the public, right? 

And especially one as vocal about transparency as Mother Jones.

On the other hand, the 990s posted on its own website are only for 2021-2023, inclusive, and the 2023 return does not include Schedule B. That leaves just two complete 990s to work with and they both provide only partial disclosures. 

Let’s look at 2021, since we started its analysis earlier.

What we learn from its Schedule B is that 103 unnamed contributors identified only by number, gave $11,396,987 in gifts that ranged from $5k to a whopping $1.868M. 

Are these from individuals or foundations? 

There is no way to tell. What we can compute is an average per capita gift of $109,586 – hardly indicative of everyday people. [Note: According to Bauerlein, the $1.947M listed as contributor #104 represents a PPP loan and is not included in that year’s “other contributions” figure of $11.4M.)

To help identify the 103 anonymous donors, we turned to the 990s of 36 American philanthropies, including the top 25 media funders identified by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and examined their disclosures for gifts to Mother Jones, only to find a paltry $7M for the twelve year period under study. And having read Tim Schwab’s deep dive into the netherworld of Bill Gates’s charitable giving, we wondered whether some portion of his estimated $2.5B in underwriting of media organizations had found its way to Mother Jones, but came up empty-handed. Bauerlein confirmed that the Gates Foundation does not support the magazine, but that does not preclude the possibility that Gates contributes personally, or through other dark-money means. 

The identity of that $1.868M donor cries out for disclosure, being seven times larger than the largest foundation gift we could identify, and rivaling in size the $1.9M PPP loan from the federal government.

Gates is a logical fit considering the spurious allegations of Mother Jones’ Disinfo Dupe reporter Kiera Butler, who has pronounced “natural immunity” a conspiracy theory and writes in defense of GMO foods and Monsanto, as investigated by Stacy Malkan on X.

In 2021, we found the following foundation gifts that matched a dollar figure disclosed on Mother Jones’s 990: Ford, $100k (line item #51); Marisla, $110k (line item #53); MacArthur $200k, (line item #49); San Francisco, $10k (line item #1), and Silicon Valley Community, $260k (line item #83). These donors are just five of the 103, and account for only $680,000 of the $11.4M, or 16.7% of money contributed that year.

Whether the remaining $10.7M came from foundations or individuals matters little. The bottom line is that big, inscrutable money is the engine driving Mother Jones. In 2021, these 103 donors funded 53% – a far cry from Bauerlein’s alleged 15% – of the magazine’s parent foundation.

That bears repeating. A mere 103 individuals and philanthropies provided nearly three times the funding that an estimated 236,000 magazine subscribers contributed, mirroring the grotesque wealth inequality that plagues America.

Our analysis smashes the facade that Mother Jones promotes democracy. Rather, it is a Potemkin Village, a tool of the oligarchy, and explains why David Corn produces such blatantly biased reporting.