Disney Caves In to Journalist Boycott

Kevin Drum gets results!

Disney will no longer ban the Los Angeles Times from advance screenings of its movies following a backlash from critics groups, news outlets and journalists, who were boycotting those same screenings in protest.

OK, fine, it didn’t have anything to do with me:

The lifting of the blackout follows an outpouring of solidarity for the Times after the paper’s film coverage was blacked out by Disney due to a story that examined the business relationship between the company’s flagship Californian theme park, Disneyland, and the city of Anaheim….On Monday, entertainment sites like The A.V. Club and Flavorwire, as well as a pop culture writer for the Washington Post, said they would skip the screenings until the ban on the Times was lifted….The New York Times joined the growing boycott on Tuesday afternoon, not long before the reversal of the ban was announced.

Good for them. If we could just get political journalists to show the same kind of moxie toward the daily briefing, we’d really be cooking.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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