Our Story
Journalism is in
trouble.
There is a crisis of credibility in legacy media. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and so on have operated as for-profit entertainment companies at everyone’s expense for decades now. A key lever of democracy is compromised.
People who want to make sense of our world have to exert tremendous energy synthesizing content from an unreasonable amount of sources. That should be the paid work of journalists, not individuals with daily obligations and their own professions. We should not have to rely on comedy programs like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver as our primary source of investigative journalism. But here we are.
The stakes keep getting higher. People’s narratives of the world are diverging sharper than ever. Social media entrenches uncritical users in their narrow algorithms and elevates myths into truths. For others, it’s a world of access to a wider knowledge base than legacy institutions allow. A conversation about political narratives must seriously engage social media.
The Saffron Journal as a progressive politics blog seeks to highlight movements toward decolonization, matriarchy and climate justice, and invites readers to build restorative interdependent communities on the ground. It intends to find truth and perhaps humor in the broad issues of our time. Its commentary is a drop in the wave of change where a multitude of voices matter.
Ethos & Approach
The Saffron Journal acknowledges that there is no such thing as unbiased media. Any source that makes this claim is woefully unaware of its own limited framework, and should be regarded with skepticism. At the same time, primary sources have weight. Personal experiences can be contextualized in broader social phenomena and power differentials. We can package evidence and arguments for an audience to discern for themselves.