For Release:
March 16, 2006
Contact:
Richard Reynolds
415/321-1740
rreynolds@motherjones.com

Mother Jones Nominated for 2006 National Magazine Award

Mother Jones magazine has again been nominated for a National Magazine Award, this time in the Public Service category for the 2006 awards. The nomination comes for “Climate of Denial,” the magazine’s May/June 2005 special report on climate change.

The anchor of the package, Chris Mooney’s “Some Like It Hot,” revealed that between 2000 and 2003 the ExxonMobil corporation distributed more than $8 million among some 40 think tanks and journalists who have made a business of “denying” scientific evidence of climate change. The recipients of ExxonMobil’s support range from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to FoxNews.com columnist Steven Milloy to the Congress of Racial Equality. These institutions promote the views of a handful of global warming skeptics; in recent years the skeptics’ views have been represented frequently in news as “balance” to the views of an overwhelming majority of climate scientists. Mooney’s investigation was cited by news organizations around the world—including the Washington Post, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New Republic, and PBS’s NOW.

The Mother Jones report was also prominently cited at a United Nations conference of the Investor Network on Climate Risk in May 2005. Three weeks later, at ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting, an unprecedented 28.4 percent of shareholders voted in support of a resolution asking the company to disclose plans for complying with greenhouse gas reduction targets.

In its 30-year history San Francisco-based Mother Jones has been nominated for 10 National Magazine Awards and has won four. In 2001 Mother Jones won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and in 2003 was a finalist for the same award.