Help Reason Be Your Antidote to Lousy Journalism!

Reason‘s first annual fundraising webathon, in which we ask our most hardcore daily consumers to support their own habit with tax-deductible contributions, came all the way back in 2008. That’s right: The webathon is now old enough to file a lawsuit, not vote, and opt out of the “Selective” Service.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO REASON EVEN BEFORE I MAKE MY CASE!

A lot has changed since 2008, not least our competitive set. This here pre-Festivus tradition has become an increasingly important contributor to our stubborn if cheerful resilience in the face of the political tumult and media collapse all around us. And now, since we’ve just matched Gerry Ohrstrom’s $100,000 matching grant, we’ve got a NEW generous challenge from the Kleinschmidt Family Foundation, which means your next $50,000 worth of donations will be doubled!

About that media collapse bit. We’ve all seen it: Once-powerful news organizations now a shell of their former selves, worn like a skin suit by more explicitly agenda-driven younger staffers. Scarequote-worthy “cable news” channels that have traded fact-gathering and philosophical diversity for tribal cope. Even the more robust and interesting independent sphere has all too often surfed audience capture and political rage-bait toward destinations bordering on crazytown.

The informational ecosystem is sick. Reason is the antidote.

Reason magazine has, since our inaugural issue in June 1968, promised “proof, not belligerent assertion,” “logic, not legends,” all while championing explicit libertarianism in a distinctly anti-libertarian mediaverse. It’s a potent combination: We’ve always been more skeptical of government than the most hard-bitten of journalists (see our classic 1981 debunking of the official Love Canal story); lately, we’ve been finding scoops doing basic verification stuff that alleged professionals have left behind.

It was Reason‘s Robby Soave who did the legwork to dismantle the media’s false accusation that Covington Catholic high school student Nick Sandmann behaved at a Lincoln Memorial protest like a smirking racist. It was Christian Britschgi who demanded to know what research supported plastic-straw bans, only to discover that the ur-source was—wait for it!—9 years old. Rape hoaxes, nail-salon exposés based on mistranslation, Joe Biden’s bubble-wrap—when the news biz sacrifices truth for narrative, Reason is there to set the record straight.

Alas, members and fans of the major political coalition knitted together by anti-media animus have not proven measurably better at generating and valuing truths, particularly as asserted in connection with proposed Republican exertions of state power. We are forever refuting not just bad ideas but bad facts: on trade and tariffs, immigration and inflation, science and sedition, welfare and war.

The comments left so far by 2025 Webathon donors underscore our role in calling balls and strikes in the ever-wilder world of politics and media. “Reason consistently does great journalism and cuts through the BS of mainstream media,” writes one. “Sanity for an insane world,” writes another. “Great to see journalism…not completely dead,” adds a third.

We are not just alive, but thriving, thanks to thousands of individual contributions from people just like you. Help us cure what ails political discourse.

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