You don’t usually hear from me, but my name is Michael Sherrard, and as membership director, my job is to build the base of grassroots donors that sustains The Intercept’s groundbreaking investigative journalism.
This Giving Tuesday, I’m reaching out to you with an important request.
Every time I join an editorial meeting, I hear about exciting new ideas for stories. Tips about potential corporate wrongdoing. Leads that need tracking down. New sources with inside info to confirm.
There are always more good ideas than we can afford to take on, and I leave each meeting with a new sense of urgency about raising the money to allow my colleagues on the editorial team to greenlight as many investigations as possible.
But here’s the challenge: After four years of Donald Trump’s chaos, plus the pandemic, a lot of people are exhausted and taking a break from the news. As a result, donations and web traffic have gone down sharply this year across all news outlets, including at The Intercept.
But corporate greed and government corruption never take a break. Those stories need to be told, and those investigations need to be done.
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For four years, with an openly racist, massively corrupt, and incompetent demagogue in the White House, the urgent importance of hard-hitting, adversarial journalism was obvious.
But the need for investigative reporting has not declined one bit under the new administration. In fact, with too many mainstream media outlets acting like the crisis is over and things have returned to “normal,” The Intercept’s unique role in challenging the status quo is even more essential.
As an Intercept reader, you know that right now is no time to look away. Corporate Democrats are obstructing progressive priorities that could deliver real change for working people. Emboldened right-wing extremists are leading a violent backlash to last year’s racial justice protests. And the climate crisis continues to accelerate.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden remains a full-throated supporter of the same bloated Pentagon budgets that Congress has passed for decades. The same media outlets that relentlessly scrutinize every dollar of social spending in his proposed Build Back Better legislation have nothing to say about the endless increase in defense spending — making our critical coverage of national security more important than ever.
I’m incredibly proud to say that since we launched our membership program, more than 70,000 people have chipped in. Those donations not only power our journalism but also provide concrete validation that our readers want us to keep digging for the truth and standing up to the powerful.
Thank you,
