Corruption Isn't Just Another Scandal. It's The Rot At The Core

We’re launching a new reporting project.

- Monika Bauerlein And Clara Jeffery

There’s an infamous saying often attributed to Josef Stalin: One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. In the Trump administration, you might say: One scandal is an outrage, a million scandals is the new normal.

That’s something we’re thinking about as we work on how Mother Jones can most effectively cover the critical 16 months ahead. What do you, our readers, need us to do to get beyond the day-to-day crazy and show the full picture? Where can our work have the most impact?

There’s an idea we keep coming back to, and to illustrate it, we wanted to open the box a bit about the way MoJo journalists work. Rewind for a minute to early March. Amid the buzz and speculation about the impending Mueller report, the Miami Herald broke a story involving New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution at a massage parlor. It turned out the former owner of the parlor, Cindy Yang, had watched the Super Bowl with Trump at a party in West Palm Beach. (Yang has since sued the Herald, claiming the story implied she owned the parlor at the time of the alleged solicitation. The paper stands by its reporting.)