“‘Truth’ is being redefined as whatever the U.S. government, NATO and other Western interests say is true. Disagreement with the West’s “group thinks,” no matter how fact-based the dissent is, becomes ‘fake news’” – (“The Orwellian War on Skepticism”).

Consortiumnews recently published an article on the decline of journalistic skepticism in media, in which it discussed the government’s aggression toward media outlets that challenge mainstream news sources such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Large corporations such as Google and Facebook are taking control over what consumers are reading, and filtering out what they believe to be, or what they want us to believe, is “fake news.”

“In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the “truth” is, then questioning that narrative will earn you “virtual” expulsion from the marketplace of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the Internet age” – (“The Orwellian War on Skepticism”).

The issue with large media corporations deciding what is deemed as “fake news” is that they are the ones deciding what “fake news” is. We as media consumers  will have no control over what we read online, and instead, will be spoon-fed filtered news through mainstream outlets who reject any information that questions our government.

Challenging one’s government is a vital part of improving one’s government. If we are to accept every word of information we read from these major media corporations, there will be no progress or evolution within the system. This is dangerous in the long-term, as our ideologies will be molded by massive media organizations, giving us no room for individual ideologies.

The main purpose of news is to inform. It should not be biased, nor should it try to shape its readers’ opinions. The news is solely meant to provide us with hard facts, and evidence that supports those facts. Above all, the news should invite its readers to question and to ponder upon issues facing our government and country. Skepticism is important in politics, and to completely deny readers the ability to question higher power is a fatalistic movement toward a repressed and silenced society.