The 'New Mexican' is following the Project Jupiter money. Have they checked the ads on their own podcast?
EDITORIAL by Warren Langford
Project Jupiter and Oracle have been spreading cash all over New Mexico political campaigns. You may have heard of the big chunk of change that landed in Deb Haaland's coffers. And that's thanks to some really stellar local reporting. Some of the best reporting has come from the paper The Santa Fe New Mexican. But a few months ago, something at The New Mexican made 505OMATIC raise a collective eyebrow
That's from the New Mexican's podcast, Around The Roundhouse. There appears to be four episodes in a row with baked-in Project Jupiter ads (Sometimes two per episode).
These are not the kind of ads that YouTube serves you up automatically. Somebody had to edit that ad into the file that was uploaded to YouTube.
The Santa Fe New Mexican, Searchlight New Mexico (which SFNM recently acquired), and it's newly formed 'The Las Cruces New Mexican' rightly think that people deserve to know who's getting money from Oracle/Project Jupiter.
That it is newsworthy.
Nowhere in these articles that they've done on Project Jupiter have we found any sort of financial support disclosure.
You may have heard something like this from NPR: "We note that Amazon is among NPR's recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some of our content"
About a week ago, we reached out to the publisher of The New Mexican by phone and email and have not received a response.
I wanna be clear, this is not the reporters' fault. Usually the ad side and the news side are kept separate on purpose kinda like the separation of church and state in some imaginary functioning democracy.
Of course, neither the donation to Deb nor the ad buy at the New Mexican prove anyone was influenced.
But it does just kinda come across as fishy. Haaland, for her part, has committed to signing a moratorium on "new," not including Project Jupiter, data centers. That seemingly was brought upon by this reporting
But the question still remains, what should she do with the money?
There's a petition for her to give it back.
But what should you do, New Mexicans, with your money? And I think the answer is clear. Subscribe to local news, whatever it is. The New Mexican. They cover a billion more stories than we do... and have several buildings in town.
Or us, you know, head over to 505OMATIC.COM and hit that subscribe button.
It would be money well spent because when local journalism gets better, we all get better. And then, you know, the local journalists don't have to go out and take sponsorships from big evil data centers...or just absolutely plaster Chevron ads into every available nook and cranny.
Yeesh.
Anyway, here's the video that's basically all the same info as above.
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