Alright, we’re making one more big push for our TPM Muckraking Fund fundraiser. It ends next week. And we want to do everything we can to get to 3000 contributors. We’re now right about 2000. So we’ve got a ways to go.
For everyone who’s contributed thus far, a very sincere thank you.
We’ve explained a few times what we’re raising the funds for. But let me briefly cover the main points again.
As you can see from a slew of the posts below, there’s just no end of scandals, investigations and — generally speaking — muck to be raked nowadays. So we’re setting up a new website — TPMmuckraker.com. As it’s name implies, the site will be dedicated to the proud tradition of journalistic muckraking, particularly, and for the foreseeable future, to the expanding web of public corruption scandals enveloping Washington today.
Many of the topics and style of reportage will be what you’ve come to expect from this site. But there’s only so much one person can do. Every day plenty of leads I get go unfollowed up just because other subjects need to be written about or through plain shortage of time. So we’re hiring two full-time reporter-bloggers who will dig into all these stories, report them out, dig through public records to find the scoops others are missing and — more than anything else — put the whole story in context.
What is it Jack Abramoff is accused of exactly? Or Bob Ney? How do Abramoff’s high-profile dealings with Tom DeLay and other DC powerbrokers connect to this bizarre casino boat case down in Florida? What’s all this business about sweatshops in the Marianas islands and what does it have to do with members of Congress who represents me?
Believe me, I spend all day on it and half the time I can’t even remember.
It’s our premise, based on extensive reporting, that these often complicated and seemingly unrelated scandals are much more closely connected than most people realize. They are all part and parcel of the political machine DeLay, Abramoff and others created to take and hold political power in Washington.
The problem is that there are so many details and just so much going on, that it’s really hard to keep track of. The daily press, by the very nature of the medium, has a hard time following these stories in any way but episodically. So the big picture is always in danger of being missed, something the bad actors involved would very much like to see happen.
That’s where we think we can find a niche, with two full-time reporter-bloggers working with the our existing two-person TPM team, digging into the details, breaking news and putting it all together in an accessible and comprehensible way so the big picture doesn’t get missed.
That’s what we want to do. To a great degree, it’s an experiment in a new form of journalism but one rooted in the same sort of dogged pursuit of stories and uncompromising dedication to the facts. We plan on hiring our two reporter-bloggers before the holidays and launching the site late next month. If you want to be part of what we’re doing, you can help us by chipping in a few dollars toward our reporter-bloggers’ salaries.
