“What a ridiculous and terrible piece.” Those words from a Mississippi Free Press reader in Eastover, a posh capital-city neighborhood, accompanied photos of the front and back of the latest attack mailer about our journalism and our team sent to mailboxes in select Jackson neighborhoods presumed to have more whiter and conservative residents.
This one displayed old, pixellated photos of me and investigative reporter Nick Judin (photos we own) alongside one of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in an apparent effort to anger and titillate rich white folk who didn’t ask for the unsigned trash in their mailboxes. It indicates falsely that, somehow, Nick and I and the team are connected to and supporting alleged corruption by Lumumba and the Black district attorney and city councilwoman who were indicted for capital-city corruption and bribery in the past year. We’ve reported what we know about it and are like everyone else watching to see and report what happens. That’s the job.
As we do with all corruption allegations, the Mississippi Free Press is covering this one—as we did with the battles over garbage contracts in recent years—in an evenhanded way and have given no indication of supporting any side in any corruption scandals. We go where the facts lead without declaring guilt (not our job), and as a statewide nonprofit we don’t do partisan reporting and don’t have the capacity to dive deeply into local races across 82 counties and don’t do endorsements. So if this is about the mayoral race, this bunco is barking up the wrong tree. This mailer innuendo is a straight-up lie by a liar who can’t spell or make a convincing argument.
Like a nonsensical mailer that went out two years ago maybe trying (and failing) to link me with Lumumba in some nefarious way, this one didn’t make a lick of sense and clearly wasn’t produced by a genius in its efforts to intimidate recipients and get them to call out friends and neighbors who might support or read the Mississippi Free Press. It demands at the top over our pictures: “Why do your friends keep supporting race bating (sic) journalists when they consistently platform, endorse and support corruption?”
Yeah, that’s libel.
In arguably the country’s most corrupt state—that in the last decade has seen a line-up of white people arrested and convicted in the TANF scandal as well as various local Black officials in various scandals—this race-baiter is tenuously trying to align me and Nick with, somehow, the charges against the mayor. That has nothing to do with his race, of course—in a state with a long history of the Citizens Council going after white people and businesses and the Hoddings Carter newspaper enterprise who did not line up with their vision of segregation and racism back when that crowd still called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a red-baiting commie.
Guilt by Association … with Black People
This is not a new stunt. In fact, I’ve seen it take many forms in this state. Back in my hometown where politicking is seldom nastier than at the Neshoba County Fair every summer, it is a long tradition for handmade signs to suddenly appear carried by paid people most won’t recognize. They hold poster boards with hand-drawn white candidate’s faces next to well-known Black figures such as Barack Obama and Bennie Thompson or, more recently, Hillary Clinton because she’s a hated woman there and, you know, a supporter of civil rights, wokeness and whatnot. I don’t do the fair any longer, but I’m guessing Kamala Harris appeared on a sloppy poster or two this year.
This puerile game is not subtle or relevant to issues the targeted white candidates are running on in the state: It’s guilt by association. It’s just a way to brand white people as, um, “race baters” for rejecting the latest brand of racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or the other bigotry du jour. The other words don’t matter and typically aren’t fact-based at all. It’s all about stoking hate and fear.
Look, I have a file cabinet and stored digital files full of similar, cowardly attacks on me—how dare I-a-white-Mississippi-woman start newsrooms that squarely face down bigotry and misogyny in my home state!?—and many of them were by educated, wealthy white men I had dubbed the North Jackson Angry Men’s Club (or N-JAM; they even tried to take back the name later, ha). A couple of them started a so-called “parody” website called jacksonfreakpress.net years ago with drawings of me whipping my male life partner and linking a photo of an investor’s young daughter to a picture of genital warts.
Let’s just say her daddy went on his own March to the Sea through North Jackson power circles after that happened. Her picture came down finally.
Likewise, on this week’s mailer, the masked marauder is trying to intimidate our nonprofit’s donors by pulling many of their names from our website and listing them on the back side of the mailer as “Donna Ladd Mega Donors.” See how this works? It’s the 1960s Citizens Council trying to boycott and intimidate white business owners into not serving Black people all over again. I’d expect to see more of this kind of attack on media, supporters and businesses across the country if I were you, no matter where you are. (Remember: You can identify who owns postal codes. We’re on it with this one. Stay tuned.)
Two mailers that went out two years ago also tried to link Lumumba and me—which is really silly if you realize how I personally view the mayor’s actions and inactions related to issues where I have expertise and passion: policing and police shootings and transparency and juvenile crime/curfews. And I, MFP co-founder Kimberly Griffin and our team have no sympathy for corruption, once proved, no matter who does it. I also know that it’s not the role of publications to characterize guilt, but to report all the facts possible, let chips fall where and on whom they may, and allow prosecutors, judges and juries to do their jobs.
Those mailers aren’t trying to make intelligent arguments against a mayor; they are straight-up attempts to “race-bate” loathing into white recipients, while taking bonus swipes at me and the Mississippi Free Press. This is clearly because we don’t shy away from reporting about racism and racist systems past and present, or these days, outright attacks on democracy and freedom.
But it’s not new, as my digital files prove. Another blogger was obsessed with getting even with me after I kicked him off the Jackson Free Press comments sections for threatening a Hispanic intern and after sending me an envelope of photos of him dressed only in a sheet. He published and allowed distortions about me for years, even calling me a “journalistic slut” for interviewing a former sheriff he had essentially accused of murder so Chief Malcolm McMillan could tell his side. It’s been really fun to see all the political ads by Democratic and Republican candidates and officials that appear on that blog next to horrific posts about me and so many other Mississippi women.
Sadly, there is an audience (and advertisers) for this trash. And it always seems to resurface right after we get national attention for our journalism, which came fast and furious in December—including for us being a media role model for our diversity, representation and inclusion efforts. Oh, and another for our fundraising success; that must really sting inside the peanut gallery. These types really hate seeing journalism that doesn’t shy away from reporting racism getting solid support. Remember that the mailers in late 2022 featured a picture of Lumumba with Drake (“Fake It Till You Drake It”) while poking at me and supporters: “Congratulations to Donna Ladd, Free Press, their employees, sponsors and donors. You’re doing amazing, sweetie.”
These are obsessed bullies. Rinse, repeat, reject.
Magnolia Tribune: ‘An Attack on Your Donors’
An interesting thing about this latest attempt to intimidate and falsely brand our newsroom was that a nonprofit newsroom with a conservative bent is named on the front of the mailer: “Tune in to the Magnolia Tribune for coverage of Jackson’s ongoing corruption and bribery scandal.” This led the person who first shared it with me to assume that Magnolia Tribune founder and editor Russ Latino had done the mailer as a promotion piece. I’m sure many people receiving it thought the same thing because it seems designed to give that impression.
Nick Judin spoke with Russ this morning, and he strongly condemned the mailer. “My sense is that clearly someone wanted to take a shot at the Mississippi Free Press, and they wanted people to believe that we were the ones doing the shooting,” Russ told Nick. “I certainly wasn’t aware of it—not involved in it, and have no need or desire to waste resources on that sort of thing.”
Russ agrees that it is trying to intimidate nonprofit supporters. “The tenor of that piece is an attack on your donors. And I generally don’t approve of that sort of thing because I think the goal of it is to marginalize or try to silence voices,” he said. “I think we’re better off when there are a lot of voices on the playing field. I think it’s wrong, and I was sad to see that it went out.”
Now, I did not believe for a minute that Russ had signed off on this misguided attempt to smear the MFP and our supporters, and I support his right to run a more conservative nonprofit news organization. An attorney, Russ helped found the conservative Empower Mississippi and then left his law practice to start the Mississippi chapter of Americans for Prosperity. Now, he runs the Magnolia Tribune and does a decent job of featuring a variety of opinions across party lines, as does the Mississippi Free Press, including Republican state leaders. (There are no Democratic elected ones here in this essentially one-party state.)
“(The mailer) clearly was intended to try to marginalize y’all’s voices,” Russ added. “I don’t always agree with y’all. In fact, I frequently disagree with you. But I think you have a right to have a voice and be on the playing field. I was surprised by it. From my end, the concern would be that somebody was trying to implicate us in sending it and or create some kind of tension between our two publications. … That kind of stuff is childish. So I hope you guys get to the bottom of whoever sent it.”
The Magnolia Tribune embraces “donor privacy” and does not name donors as we do above a certain level on our website. This brings up an important issue in journalism; the presiding ethic, supported by the Institute for Nonprofit News of which we’re a member and benefit from its year-end NewsMatch program, is that newsrooms should reveal who support and fund us so the public can have faith in what we report and why, and that we’re not bought in some way. From the INN membership standards: “Any person relying on a nonprofit news site’s reporting should be able to easily learn the major financial supporters of the news outlet, and about its values and leadership. INN member newsrooms commit to financial transparency, letting the public know the institutions and individuals that provide significant levels of funding to support the journalism. INN members do not rely on anonymous donations or ‘dark money’ to fund their journalism.”
We do offer an opt-out option for donors and obviously we do not publish personal information. But we do believe in transparency as a keystone to democracy and note in or under stories when we use donors as sources.
By the way, if you’re a donor who is targeted in any way for supporting us, please let me know right away at donna@mississippifreepress.org or kimberly@mississippifreepress.org. We appreciate each and every one of you for supporting our journalism in the U.S., American, and in support of democracy, transparency and freedom for all.
It is a time to be courageous.
Today is the last day of our 2024 NewsMatch campaign. Give now here to support our fearless, honest and nonpartisan journalism, and your gift is tripled by a long-time reader joined by a $4,800 Free Press Founders’ Match by Todd Stauffer and Stephen Barnette of Jackson Free Press; Donna Ladd (JFP and Mississippi Free Press) and Kimberly Griffin (MFP)!