[WARNING! THIS IS A SINCERE POST!]

Mission Statement by Editor, Dr. Zero

The Daily Zero is an exploration of the experience of reading about politics in America, reflecting on the forums, forms, and information that comprise our media landscape. 

From social media echo chambers to decidedly misleading facts and speech; from demagoguery to paranoia; from endless advertisements to surveillance, reading almost seems as if it has become harder. Yet this may be precisely what we are being taught to believe — that truth and independence are in scarce supply. 

There is undoubtedly much propaganda circulating online. Still, a disbelief in the possibility of accessing facts, evidence, and experiences only serves to facilitate the murderous degradation of democracy ever-present in American politics. This confusion is often deliberately prompted, a tool for helping politicians quell democratic participation or for helping demagogues enforce their self-serving version of reality.

Perhaps the person who most effectively derides the truth is Donald Trump, a President who undermines the legitimacy of news organizations with constant cries of fake news. This atmosphere of dishonesty, conspiracy, and confusion helps erode the public’s agency and facilitate unchecked power. The greatest threat to our democracy is not fake news but the fear of its ubiquity.

The Daily Zero is committed to prompting thought about how we read the news. We hope to satirize the media landscape, providing a mechanism through which to confront our times and reanimate thinking. We believe many contemporary media organizations often conduct the following alarming behavior:

1. Proclivity for conflating impartiality with relativism, avoiding important opportunities for fact-making, truth-building and moral reckoning in the face of abundantly clear crimes;
2. Actively upholding structural incentives to produce material that will increase profits rather than provide equal visibility to the public realm;
3. Failure to more proactively confront the media’s role in providing advertising space to political candidates and special interest groups;
4. Failure to provide the necessary tools through which a reader might independently think or judge the matter at hand, through either misleading pre-packaged conclusions or inadequate provision of relevant sources, perspectives, and precedents;
5. Tendency to aid deliberate attempts by political and special interest groups to mislead, scare, and convince readers that truth is scarce.

To combat these trends, The Daily Zero will use satire to discuss the content and form of political media. It takes satire as a statement in and of itself, wielding irony to express simultaneous meanings and perspectives and thus refusing to reproduce singular ideologies. Yet, while The Daily Zero is committed to disrupting prevailing approaches, it is also adopting satire to recommit to truth. With irony, we hope not to flee from drawing a line in the sand; quite the opposite: we hope to directly confront our moral crises.

We hope to participate in an active reading community, promoting political reflection with humor. In part we hope to provide a creative forum for artistic expression, remaining dedicated to the idea that critiquing and building are not opposing approaches. Our site is a plea to see construction and deconstruction as sisters in a quest for a greater justice.

We pledge to hold ourselves accountable to an inclusive vision of politics. The source of our humor is not a mockery of the suffering of human beings, but rather a mockery of those who would promote, forget, or deride that suffering. We commit to an openness to critical reception and will insist upon a reflection of ourselves and our impact. All feedback will be considered with the utmost seriousness.

The Daily Zero is thus committed to reanimating thinking online.

Yours, 

Dr. Zero