Newsdesk.org, The Public Press and the Knight Foundation-supported SPOT.US "crowdfunding" project are teaming up to raise $2,500 to support investigative coverage and fact-checking of San Francisco-focused election advertisements. Your micro-donation will make a difference!
[Newsdesk.org editor Josh Wilson interviewed by David Cohn of Spot.Us]
Pledge Your Support for SF Election Ad Fact-Checking:
http://wiki.spot.us/election
If you are a San Francisco voter, your pledge of $25 will help us meet our funding goal, and hire a professional reporter to provide weekly investigative coverage and fact-checking of election ads, running from Labor Day through Election Day. These reports will run for free on Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org, and will be made available for free to any media partners who wish to use them.
The need
It’s election season, and your brain is the target of one of the highest-stakes, most expensive influence campaigns in the world.
What’s the quality of the information you’re getting? Where can you turn for a breakdown of the facts, issues and money behind those election advertisements? Not just for the grand-scale national races, but at the local level?
Sadly, there is a historical gap in Bay Area news media’s coverage of campaign advertising. During the 2004 elections, for example, GradeTheNews.org found that Bay Area TV news averaged 1minute 24 seconds nightly covering ballot initiatives, but ran 2 minutes 41 seconds of paid advertising for those initiatives.
Help Newsdesk.org and the Public Press fill that gap by supporting a weekly investigative report on Bay Area campaign advertisements, to run from Labor Day through Election Day.
Our goal is to help Bay Area residents cut through the barrage of influence advertising, and make truly informed decisions at the voting booth — from the candidates to the ballot initiatives and propositions.
About Newsdesk.org
Since 2000, Newsdesk.org has led commercial mass media with groundbreaking, nonpoliticized coverage of veterans’ health care and PTSD; the 2004 presidential election and the 2003 San Francisco mayoral runoff; the energy industry in the developing world; genetically engineered agriculture, and much more.
Newsdesk also is the producer of News You Might Have Missed, a unique source for important but overlooked news from around the world, published every Wednesday since February 2002.
Your donation is an investment in high quality, truly independent coverage of an important issue that has been neglected.
Thank you for your support!
