Issues with fake news have become so problematic to the future of our nation that President Barack Obama gave his final farewell speech about why fake news is damaging.

We are so stuck in our talking points when we attempt to converse with one another that we cannot get to really talking about each point and coming up with a way to compromise and figure out a solution for the problem we both perceive.

We are completely enthralled by “facts” that are exclusive to our media bubble and do not allow ourselves to listen or admit that the facts proven by science or otherwise are real. It’s a challenge to even know how to tell whether something is fake.

Fake news tends to fizzle out and have no meaningful resolution. Much like Hillary Clinton’s emails, which pop up in the media from time to time, but never end with a clear message. Did she really do something different than what her predecessors did? The FBI has cleared her twice.

Why is this coming up, time and time again? Because it feeds into this idea that Hillary is a criminal who is not fit for presidency. Constantly bringing up these emails helped in her drop in public opinion. It helped Donald Trump become president.

In his speech Obama exclaims the value of having a diverse media. In the United States it seems that there is a channel targeted to each individual, much like magazines have become since their creation. He explained that having your own news bubble seems uplifting, the tendency for people to not accept facts that do not affirm their “established opinions.”

Obama called this trend a threat to democracy.

It keeps us from having similar truths from which to discuss and build a common ground between two or more seemingly opposite opinions.

But truth does exist somewhere, the problem is that people only pick and choose parts of the truth to base their beliefs and opinions.

Obama describes why we have forums for debate built within our political system, “Politics is a battle of ideas; in the course of a healthy debate, we’ll prioritize different goals, and the different means of reaching them.”

But he also says, “without some common baseline of facts; without a willingness to admit new information, and concede that your opponent is making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, we’ll keep talking past each other, making common ground and compromise impossible.”

Why does our media preach to one bubble or another?

Media is a for-profit institution that acts based on the ideal of informing its audience. If the audience stops watching news sources and instead only watches and subscribes to the biased opinions of others, then as a for-profit institution news media hits a critical point where it needs to change.

While this change can be good for economical reasons, it has not been good for news media as far as producing informative news.

What happened to news media when this crash hit was that it was bought up by companies intending on cutting costs and making a profit by compressing small independent news companies into corporations.

This move did give news a new boost in profitability because it cut the need for each news operation to have their own printing press. It turn this cut the amount of people employed and reduced the payroll.

The change has also reduced the number of reporters for each news outlet while still having the demand to produce the same amount of stories on the reporters and journalists who are left. Leaving reporters less time to actually investigate whether something is true or even allowing them to move more than one interview or spend enough time telling the story as it truly is, rather than just what it seems on the surface.

Lack of time to go and find new stories and relevant stories journalists are forced to recycle stories other reporters have already done.

So, now we see news that isn’t empirical or fact based. “News” has become something regurgitated over and over with nothing but new opinions piled on top of little or completely un-checked “facts.”

People on both sides of the isle are showing signs of feeling underserved by their media.

Charlie Sykes in a closing interview with Cap Times Jessie Opoien on December 14, 2016, says that conservatives feel underserved by traditional publications.

Sykes has been one of the most influential Wisconsin conservative voices. Many liberals actually accuse him of pushing people’s opinions farther towards media bubbles.

Whether or not that is true Sykes acknowledges that it’s a problem for people who want to go forward. In the end, he says it’s there. Bubbles are a huge issue for us to combat. They allow us to demonize each other more readily because the viewpoints between people are so skewed that there is no feasible middle ground.

So, now people are turning to independent sites for their news. Many, if not most of these sites re-publish old news with their own biased spin and since this spin ascribes to the ideals of one side or another, people are hooked.

This is true across just about all political sides. People are being underserved by their publications. Investigative journalism is losing traction in a world where information is pushed out within a few moments of being found.

Journalists are forced to publish and expand on things that don’t really matter for news or politics but they generate a higher number of clicks and ratings.

It’s not leaving much room for truth.

Journalists get into this field to inform the public of the truth. Of fact and realities of how something is happening as well as what’s happening now.

If we keep allowing old news to inform us then we aren’t living in today, we are instead living in history.

While understanding what has happened in the past is important. If we continuously rewrite the past to fit into our bubble’s ideology then what we believe was history is actually just opinions that present themselves as facts. They don’t represent what truly happened.

Moving to independent sources to get your news can just cloud the truth and make it more and more difficult for you to discern. This is especially true with independent new that ascribes to a particular opinion bubble. It’s difficult to hold these sources accountable for what they are doing to drive people away from the truth, but you can do it.

The truth is a fickle thing because truth lies in context. Without having news that can describe that context accurately, you won’t be lead to the truth by it.

But you can hold them accountable. By reading news that describes the other side of the argument as well as reading news that attempts to be entirely fact based, you can begin to see where the facts actually line up. The similarities in the different news stories will let you see what actually happened, and what the facts actually are.