At the start of this month, we set an ambitious goal of raising $900,000 to fund our reporting in the year to come. It was an ambitious goal because these are unprecedented times of crisis, and we have ambitious plans for 2021.
But now, with barely a week left before December 31, I’m disappointed to report that we’ve only raised $300,000, and that’s a problem because we’re facing huge challenges in the year ahead.
The Obama-Biden administration was one of the most hostile toward whistleblowers and journalists that we’ve ever seen — and far more effective at suppressing dissent than Donald Trump’s buffoonery. There’s no reason to think that President Biden will be any different.
Meanwhile, so many newsrooms have been gutted over the last decade that investigative journalists are becoming an endangered species, leaving it to The Intercept and only a handful of other outlets to dig deep and uncover wrongdoing by government and corporations.
That’s why The Intercept is needed now more than ever — and why we can’t afford to fall short of our ambitious year-end goal.
As racist and corrupt as Trump’s presidency has been, things will likely get much harder for journalists under the incoming Biden administration.
Trump makes a big public show tweeting about the media as the “enemy of the people,” but it was Barack Obama who most aggressively used the draconian 1917 Espionage Act against journalists and whistleblowers, bringing three times more cases than every other previous president combined.
The Obama-Biden administration destroyed the lives of reporters simply doing their jobs, labeling one journalist a criminal “co-conspirator” and threatening The Intercept’s James Risen (then at The New York Times) with jail time when he refused to reveal sources.
Meanwhile, we’re already seeing far too many pundits buy into the narrative that the “adults” are back in charge of the government, and everyone else can go back to business as usual. But the reporters at The Intercept have been doing this work for a long time, and we know that Trump is far from the first president to bully journalists or lie to the American people.
We set an ambitious goal of raising $900,000 by the end of the year because we know we need to be prepared for these challenges. But right now, it’s looking like we may fall short, leaving us without resources we’d counted on to hold the powerful to account.
