Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Man, I love 1970s San Francisco — a San Francisco before tech, before screens, when it was a working-class and cosmopolitan town of mixing and excess: Zoetrope, Fort Mason, the ILWU, gay power, Chicano art, and, of course, Mother Jones, a small magazine with big dreams.
As Adam Hochschild recalled in 2001 on the occasion of the 25th birthday of the magazine, quote, “We were then working in cramped quarters above a San Francisco McDonald’s, and the smell of frying burgers drifted up from below. We would have been amazed to know that the magazine would still be here some 200 issues later and several offices later. Multinationals like McDonald’s endure forever, it seems, while dissenting magazines flare up, attract a little attention, and then die.”
But Mother Jones did not die — not in 2001, and not here in 2026. And this morning, we ask why and also how.
We’re joined by Adam Hochschild, journalist, author, and cofounder of Mother Jones magazine, and author of so many books, among them American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Welcome, Adam.
Adam Hochschild: Thank you, Alexis. It’s great to be here.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re also joined by Clara Jeffery, editor in chief since, I think, 2006 of Mother Jones, and now also of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Welcome, Clara.
Clara Jeffery: Thank you so much for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: So, Adam, just take us back to the founding of the magazine. There’s this incredible flowering of publications in San Francisco in the late ’60s and early ’70s. How did you see Mother Jones within the scheme of San Francisco publishing, such as it was?
Adam Hochschild: Well, let’s roll back the clock to that year, 1976 — and actually even two years earlier, to 1974 — when all of us who were young journalists at that time were stunned that investigative journalism brought down a president. Woodward and Bernstein from The Washington Post, their investigations of the Watergate scandal, forced President Nixon to resign — the most evil president the United States has had until this moment. It was a stunning example of what journalism could do.
Yet at the same time, those of us who were political progressives, who cared about social justice, about ecology, the environment, about stopping U.S. military interventions overseas, we didn’t see many places where our voices could reach a large audience. There were long-established magazines like The Nation and The Progressive that did a good job but reached quite small audiences, often in a fairly drab way — just black-and-white type on newsprint or newsprint-like paper.
San Francisco had been the scene of a magazine that did much more than that, Ramparts, which was published here in the late ’60s and early ’70s. And I worked at it for a time.
Alexis Madrigal: An exciting magazine where lots of people came through there.
Adam Hochschild: Yeah. It was a very exciting magazine at its height, and it reached a fairly large audience. Peak circulation, I think, was well over 200,000. But there were management problems, and it died in 1975.
So several of us who had actually met each other working at Ramparts a couple of years earlier decided this is a good time for a new magazine. We started one. And as I wrote in that article you quoted from 25 years ago, we would have been amazed to know it was still going 25 years later — still more amazed to know that it was going 50 years later.
And I think dismayed to find that so many of the problems that concerned us then are still with us. We were worried then about U.S. military intervention in Central America. I actually went to El Salvador myself for the magazine, interviewed political prisoners, went inside a political prison, and so on. The issue of intervention is still with us. In recent months, Trump has talked about taking over Greenland. He’s bombed Iran, talked about taking over Canada. Who knows what’s coming next?
So that’s an issue that’s still with us. And almost anything else we can name that we were concerned about then is still with us today.
Alexis Madrigal: I mean, one of the key things you pointed out in that essay — and Clara, I’ll come to you on this one — was that Watergate is kind of peak political accountability journalism. But there was something that the Mother Jones founders were noticing, which was that corporate power in this era of proto-globalization or early globalization was also something that needed to be held to account. And that became one of the key hallmarks of Mother Jones.
Clara Jeffery: It’s so interesting because I had the pleasure of rereading Adam’s essay too. And that essay was written in early 2001, and it was sort of chronicling the last few decades and also looking ahead. It was very much focused on the corporate takeover and the corporate influence on our life, and that that, at that time, was seen as the primary threat against a just and fair America.
Of course, a few months later, 9/11 happened, and pretty much our entire society pivoted to be for or against the war on terror. And that was very much the preoccupation for the magazine for the first eight years that I was at it.
But what’s interesting now, I think, is that in his essay, Adam talked about the political corruption that Nixon represented and how that led to things like Mother Jones — NPR was also founded in its way — that a lot of journalism came to the fore after that. But now the real corruption was corporate corruption.
Right now, I think what we’re seeing is the combination of the two. We’re seeing an oligarchic society where we have a president who just wants to enrich himself and hand out favors to other billionaires, just making the most obscenely corrupt decisions himself and basically allowing tech companies in particular to run unfettered over society.
Today, they are basically abolishing all the regulations that the EPA has used to hold carbon emitters and polluters to account. Those are just gone now. So it’s very much an era, I think, that we’re in where the leaders of the Republican Party — Trump chief among them — have gone hand in hand with corporate titans to completely dictate what’s happening to the rest of us.
Alexis Madrigal: You know, Adam, it’s interesting to revisit some of the big stories from those early Mother Jones days, in part because they are about holding corporate power to account. But also, you could assume at some level that were you to show it the right way, there would be some sort of response from the government about these problems that corporations were creating.
So why don’t you talk a little bit about what feels like it was another big early turning point for the magazine — this investigation into the Ford Pinto?
Adam Hochschild: That was a very exciting moment for us. It was about a year and a half after Mother Jones started publishing. And I think it was when the magazine really hit its stride, and we saw, yes, there was a need for journalism that would do for corporations what Woodward and Bernstein had done for the Nixon White House.
And here was the story. The Ford Pinto, at that time — a small car — was the most widely sold model of automobile in America. But Pintos had a disturbing tendency to burst into flame when hit from behind at quite low speeds, 10 to 15 miles an hour. You get rear-ended — boom — burst into flame, explosion.
More than 500 people had been killed, and a far larger number seriously burned and injured in Pinto crashes. And the reason why the cars caught fire so easily was that the Pinto’s gas tank was between the rear bumper and the axle instead of where it should be, which was forward of the rear axle.
It turned out that Ford’s engineers had warned the company before the first Pintos began being manufactured: Hey, this is going to cause problems. But Ford calculated that paying off the anticipated number of insurance claims from this problem would cost less than retooling their entire assembly line to put the gas tank in a safer place.
And we got the memo where they made that calculation.
Alexis Madrigal: That’s what I loved about that story.
Adam Hochschild: Right? The credit for that goes to the writer on the story, Mark Dowie, who is still practicing as an investigative journalist today. He got that memo. I was the editor on the story, but he really did the writing of it. It was a terrific piece. It filled up eight or ten pages in the magazine. We had diagrams of the car.
The story created a tremendous ruckus — front page of The New York Times. Ralph Nader held a press conference to release it. Ford denied everything but then, some weeks later, instituted the largest auto recall in American history up to that point to try to make a quite inadequate fix for this problem.
It turned out, I learned while working on the story, that Mark Dowie had obtained this memo and a lot of his other information from product liability lawyers. These are the people that you go to if a corporation’s product — whether it be an exploding car or something else — injures you. So product liability lawyers were a particularly good source for him.
A couple of months after that, I was at a party in our neighborhood in San Francisco and met a new resident. I asked him what he did for a living. He said, “I’m a product liability lawyer.” And dreams of glory were in my head. I said, “Oh, if you ever have any good stories, you know, I work for Mother Jones magazine.”
He finished the sentence. He said, “You’d be the last person I’d bring them to.”
It turns out he was a product liability lawyer for the other side. So my career as a crusading investigative reporter was foiled at that point.
Alexis Madrigal: He could’ve gotten into PR for Ford, you know.
Adam Hochschild: I’ll have to do some stories about other things.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about Mother Jones magazine, now 50 years in operation. Also talking about the current state of journalism. We’ve got Adam Hochschild, journalist, author, and one of the cofounders of Mother Jones magazine. We’ve also got Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of the magazine.
Is there a story from Mother Jones that changed the way you think? What are your questions about the future of journalism? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. The email is forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media — BlueSky, Instagram, Discord, etc. We are @KQEDForum.
I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more.
