From KQED.

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 back then, 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 co-founder of Mother

Jones magazine, author of so many books, among them, American Midnight,

The Great War, A Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis. Welcome, Adam. Thank you, Alexis.

It's great to be here. We're also joined by Clara Jeffrey, editor-in-chief since I think 2006 of Mother

Jones and now also the Center for Investigative Reporting. Welcome, Claire.

Thank you so much for having me. So Adam, just take us back to the founding of the of the magazine.

There's this incredible flowering of publications in San Francisco, late 60s, early 70s. How did you see Mother Jones kind of within the scheme of San Francisco publishing such as it was?

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, you know, 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

...