Jane Mayer - Art Pope

Art Pope

On October 10, 2011, The New Yorker published a piece by Mayer about North Carolina Republican figure Art Pope entitled “State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012's top battlegrounds.”

Mayer supplemented her article on Pope with a blog entry pointing out that Pope, who preaches self-reliance, had in fact received money from his parents.

The article drew criticism from the right, however. At the Chronicle of Higher Education website, Mark Bauerlein called it “a tendentious, poorly-researched, and weakly-argued bit of journalism....Mayer’s ideology places every word and deed of Pope in cynical or dastardly light” At the Daily Caller, J. Peder Zane wrote that Mayer's article on Pope was “being taken as gospel in liberal circles, already receiving glowing coverage in The Huffington Post and on 'The Rachel Maddow Show.'” And George Leef at the National Review wrote that “Mayer is clearly playing to leftist readers who lap up the notion that whenever a person with wealth uses some of it in an effort at slowing or reversing the growth of governmental power, that is something dangerous and intellectually disreputable.”

John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog described Mayer's essay on Pope as “Mayer’s latest effort on behalf of the Democratic Party” and said “Mayer is of the shamelessly hypocritical liberal money=good, conservative money=bad school.”

Art Pope also replied in the National Review, saying that what Mayer left out of her story "was the inconvenient fact that Republicans in 2010 were outspent by Democrats by a large margin (as they were in 2008), and that every dollar I and other conservatives spent was more than matched by “progressive” individuals and organizations." Furthermore, an employee of the Pope Center, George Leef, replied on that organization's website.