I tried emailing Mother Jones Magazine through its online “Talk Back” link but it kept coming back as undeliverable, a telling sign of the vacuum in which the self-described “muckracking” magazine operates as of late.

It seems that the magazine’s editors, in light of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” opening in New York this week, decided to pull up an old article it commissioned by Joshua Hammer in 2003 and run that instead of actually doing any work. Interstingly, it used a version that it had since admitted was full of errors, not to mention the fact that it also contains plagiarized sections and would be considered libelous if the subject were in fact alive and able to defend herself.

I’ve sort of tired of the likes of magazines such as Mother Jones, The Progressive, etc., that tend to be less interested in investigation, illumination or decent prose — the stuff that gives a magazine its teeth — but still try to look like they have some bite behind their bark. They have been left behind by their betters at Harpers and The New Yorker, magazines that are not necessarily identified with the left, but rather with the intelligent. When was the last time the Bush Administration had to address the content of a Mother Jones article in a press conference?

Exactly.

But to continue beating up the reputation of a young woman who had the wherewithall to stand with a Palestinian family on behalf of human rights, morality and dignity? Well, let’s just say this is no longer the magazine that was supposedly named for Mary Harris Jones. But if Hammer’s stale, faulty hit piece is still good enough for Mother Jones to run, here’s the response to it, offered by CounterPunch on Sept. 20, 2003. It’s just a relevant:

Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Specious Journalism in Defense of Killers
By PHAN NGUYEN

Mother Jones demonstrated how low it could set its standards for investigative journalism when it hired Newsweek reporter Joshua Hammer to surf the web and write a 7000-word feature story on Rachel Corrie and the International Solidarity Movement (”The Death of Rachel Corrie”, Sept/Oct 2003). It appears that fact-checking and verification was not a priority in the production of this article. Before I had even finished reading the Hammer’s smear job I had already discovered that the writer had no shame in culling information from indiscriminate websurfing. Take, for instance, Hammer’s description of a memorial service held for Corrie in Rafah soon after she was killed:

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