I have always told my children, “It doesn’t matter what you think; it only matters what is.” In this day of social media, “fake news,” and so-called journalism, how are we supposed to know the truth? It’s a myth that news used to be unbiased. It’s impossible for people reporting on a story to be unbiased. Having said that, journalists are supposed to look at all aspects of a story and report them. Today, it seems like most “journalists” only report the side of the story that benefits their beliefs. There are fewer and fewer real journalists left.

Why is that? Most news agencies are corporations. With the advent of social media and news sites, the days of print are basically dead. When a newspaper’s primary income is subscriptions of their printed media, and the digital age decades old, the old income models are no longer sufficient. Add in the 24-hour news cycle, and it’s impossible for print-only news agencies to survive. Some people pay for the online version of the printed media, but people have expected internet-based content to be free. It’s like, why pay for porn when porn is free? There are reasons for that, but I won’t go into it here.

Corporations are owned my shareholders. The purpose of owning shares (voting and ownership stakes in the company) is to make money from owning their shares. Shareholders can be one person or millions of people. When a company doesn’t make money, shareholders lose faith in the company. They will either sell their shares or vote current leadership out. In order to make money, news media went from a storytelling model to a ratings model. Telling all sides of a story became nonprofitable. Shock sells, so the news media tried to get the most controversial headlines to get people to click on their stories or to tune into their channel. As news media became more polarized, real journalism fell by the wayside. Truth was left in the dust, at least the full truth.

People tend to be tribal, so they stick with their preferences and confirmation biases. The full truth is rarely told by news media. Throw in the click-bait and social media, and the truth gets diluted to opinion. News media would fire people who didn’t tow the line. This either happened from pressure of social media bots, influencers, and outrage from a very vocal minority. Right or left winged, news agencies fell into this trap. “Say what we tell you to say, or you’ll be cancelled.

So, where is the truth? It’s typically somewhere in the middle, but it takes people to do their own research. When news media uses themselves as sources, but people do not pay attention, it can be easy for all of us to fall into the trap of believing what we’re told. Sometimes, these sources cited are other news agencies who are in league with each other to preach their dogma. News Agency A will cite News Agency B, and news Agency B will cite News Agency A. The tagline for “The X-Files” is “The Truth is Out There.” That’s true, but it’s covered in mud. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack submerged in a tar pit in a mud hole.

In the end, it is doesn’t matter what we think. It only matters what is. History is written by the victors; it isn’t the full truth. History is being rewritten by news agencies and scholars with an agenda. We might never know what “is” really is. We can only take all of the knowledge we can gather and make our own conclusions. Even that is biased to a degree, no matter how diligent we try to be in looking at all sides. Regimes burn books to prevent knowledge from spreading. Governments and social media do the same thing in the digital age with the internet.

While we have more information at our fingertips than ever before, most of that information is bullshit. Scholarly articles have been subjugated to DEI and the woke subculture. True science doesn’t discriminate, it just gives facts. Those facts might be open to interpretation since we humans do not know everything about anything. We’ve turned our backs on truth because we didn’t like it or it hurt our feelings. In the end, it doesn’t matter what we think and what we facts we ignore. The universe doesn’t give a shit about us. If a gamma-ray burst was going to collide with Earth, not wanting to believe it will happen, doesn’t change the fact that it will strip our atmosphere and kill all life on this planet. In the end, it doesn’t matter what we think; it only matters what is.