What is the truth, anyway?

Two Realities, One Nation

The ball dropped, strangers kissed and Diplo confessed to being high on magic mushrooms on-air. 2025 was off to an optimistic start… for about two minutes. The new year didn’t waste any time reminding Americans just how fractured their sense of reality has become. Almost instantly, news of a terrorist attack on Bourbon St. made headlines, just hours before an active-duty Green Beret detonated a cybertruck at a Trump Hotel. Whether these events were consequential of a mental health crisis or an open border depended on who you cast your vote for, and ultimately, Andy Cohen wasn’t the only one sobering to the reality—or realities—of 2025.

One week later, four major fires ignited, surrounding Los Angeles and burning over 80,400 acres. No matter where you were in the country, your neighbors weighed in—either blaming democratic leaders for deliberately withholding water or the leaders who refuse to withhold fossil fuels. 

One debate. Two viewers. Two entirely different realities.

Facts are dismissed as “bias,” and all who claim to be a truth-seeker are only seeking the truths they sought. Mainstream outlets are at war with one another as their E.I.Cs battle their own C.E.Os, and online algorithms trap literally everybody in echo chambers of their own design. 

Can facts be trusted in the age of isolated information bubbles?

Despite the nuclear-level explosion of political polarization and trust in the media’s record-breaking low, the idea of Americans existing in two separate and constructed worldviews, is not a sign of contemporary times. 

A Long History of Manufactured Truths

Before outlandish conspiracy theories were printing under the guise of investigation, there was “yellow journalism”—a style of sensationalized reporting in the 19th century, featuring works of fiction, often supported by cherry-picked information, pseudoscience, bogus theories from self-proclaimed experts, and even quotes that were only said by the writer as they read their work aloud. 

Today’s sensational stories—equally void of substantial evidence from reliable sources—are often repeated by people who introduce them  with, “I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s a fascinating theory.” 

—and eventually, digital. But try explaining that to a journalist in 1898.

You see, mankind has long been long fascinated with alternative explanations for events—eager to play detective—as evidenced by the 1898 explosion of a United States Navy ship, the USS Maine. The yellow papers printed, sparking debates and directly contributing to the onset of the Spanish-American War. They told tales of the Spaniards’ responsibility for the ship’s destruction, using a common tactic in psychological manipulation—what Psychiatry Professor Robert Jay Lifton calls, thought-terminating clichés.

“The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” Lifton wrote in his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” 

“Remember the Main! To hell with Spain!” Americans chanted through the streets—an angry and desperate rallying cry.

“But, the official investigation explained the ship’s use of an exceptionally flammable oil,” a neighbor might attempt to reason. “That’s what they want you to believe. Remember the Main! To hell with Spain!” And just like that—the conversation is terminated. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer figured that a story about a foreign enemy was more interesting than an explainer of oil’s flammability, selling far more copies, and in turn, creating a new reality for their readers. 

The kicker? Pulitzer privately thought that “nobody outside a lunatic asylum” really believed these stories he ran. Don’t be the fool Pulitzer thought you to be. Instead, be media-literate. 

The Problem with Bias

Today, outlets aren’t criticized for their color, but rather—their bias. But, I’m going to let you in on a journalistic secret: While the goal is to report impartially, bias is inevitable. Every. Single. Time. 

It’s fair to be skeptical of media bias—in fact, it’s a healthy instinct in a world of competing narratives. But skepticism shouldn’t mean abandoning fact-based reporting altogether. Reliable outlets will prioritize accountability and factual accuracy—qualities essential to navigating today’s fractured information ecosystem. 

You see, Bias doesn’t mean the information presented is wrong—it’s about how (and if) they’re told. It often reflects a lens through which information is interpreted, not a dismissal of truth itself. Media-framing might shape perceptions of facts, calling a demonstration a “riot,” while another headline reads, “protest,” so how do you receive the headline? Instead of asking, “Are they biased?” ask yourself, “Are they accurate?” 

Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber

A common misconception  regards cross-pollinating in the media spheres, guiding many consumers to bias-checkers like “AllSides,” to see what’s being said on all sides. However, experts theorized cross-pollinating leads to further polarization—Such tools often dismiss a fact-based outlet as “biased,” and an unreliable outlet as “just another perspective.” With this in mind, political scientists and professors UC Berkeley’s David Broockman and Yale’s Joshua Kalla conducted a study—And before you scoff, “bias” at their respected establishments, consider their reliability. 

According to Broockman and Kalla, when Fox viewers watched CNN, they heard about all sorts of things Fox wasn’t telling them, processing the information, taking it in, and becoming more knowledgeable about what was really going on in the United States. 

One lesson here is that even Fox viewers are reachable with real news, and while the war on fact-checking has been known to affirm deceptions more firmly, plain news—and even analyzed news—still registers.

The biggest takeaway here is the realization that Fox viewers are not just deceived and misinformed—they are literally made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear lots of newsy-sounding things without learning what is actually happening. For instance, they often dwell on a rumor that doesn’t reflect actual society—say, a child identifies as a cat. Political analyzers discuss obscure conflicts, “What if your child’s school required litter boxes?” and the endless stories spinning off of the one instance. Meanwhile, those stories have taken up viewers’ news consumption, void of any content about things actually happening and impacting their communities. 

“Media literacy has absolutely nothing to do with which side of the debate you’re on,” librarian Lisa Manganello, a 17-year veteran of the academic subject told CNN. “And I often say to my students, ‘I don’t care if you are conservative or if you are liberal. It doesn’t make a difference to me.’”

Learning Media Literacy

Manganello’s students are not told what to read, but rather, how to look at them from a critical lens and make a decision about trustworthiness. “You can have an opinion on either side, but you should be able to validate that opinion with a fact-based article.” —distinguishing fact from fiction.

If a source consistently rejects accountability or undermines proven facts, it’s worth asking: who benefits from keeping you misinformed?

Have you been encouraged to trust—or distrust—a source by someone who directly benefits from your believe—or disbelief—in it? Or noticed that the news you consume often aligns with the interest of those it praises? This could be a case of inherent bias at play. Not to mention, if a campaign narrative relies on dismissing fact-based reporting and fact-checking as “fake news,” there’s a direct and clear benefit to keeping you misinformed. 

Most Americans know the exhaustion that comes with following the media conglomerates, C.E.Os, E.I.Cs, politicians and a web of relationships connecting them all, leaving us to wonder: If every truth has an architect, are we building realities on false foundations? 

And of course, there’s the age-old saying about each side having its story with the truth being in the middle. The validity of this saying is complex today. While useful in the instance of debates about leadership approaches and political priorities, the tide turns when radical voices and false equivalency are rationalized. Science for instance, is a solid reference-point for truth.

Now, science turns away many religious folk whose dogma contradicts it, but this actually doesn’t have to be a case. As scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson advocates, people should be open-minded about the unknown. 

After all, every conclusion begins with a hypothesis. 

Belief vs. Denial

Naturally, the issue with making space for an anti-scientific reality is that, now you have an entire population dismissing matters demanding a vote—even though, once proven or disproven by science, such things are no longer a belief, but rather—denial. 

Still, some elements of divisive truths can be backed by science only to an extent. For instance, science and medicine don’t bother with philosophical concepts of life and death—important ideas in the ever-relevant abortion debate.

Is abortion murder? Despite the picket signs of those outside of clinics, the answer is subjective. What is certain? We know that a naturally-conceived fetus cannot survive outside of the womb within the first five and a half months, an ultrasound detects a heartbeat around six weeks and that most women discover pregnancies between four and 12 weeks in.

Now, for people that exist in the same reality as science, they have some thinking of their own to do: Is a fetus that can’t survive without its vessel alive? If so, is abortion murder within that period? If so, are women entitled to murdering a fetus? This debate is an example of one that is—yes, political—but also complex, nuanced and doesn’t just call for critical thinking; it demands it. 

“Choice is legitimate, preserving life is legitimate and sometimes they run into conflict,” the  famed “Father of Modern Linguistics,” Noam Chomsky said in an interview for Lake of Fire. “As women have more opportunities, more education, better medical care, more family planning, fertility rates go down, abortion goes down, children are better cared for and women are healthier—those things are known and easily under social control, and should not be controversial. At the same time, if you look at the same people who are the most militant about saving the fetus, are they calling for these things?”

The takeaway here is that plenty of the over-simplified thoughts, hand-fed to American voters are like this—requiring critical analysis.

Still, picture a venn diagram—two realities intersecting in the middle. What truth do both realities have in common? A conjoined world of deeply ingrained biases and polarized trust, leading to their divide. But surely, everything can’t be true at once.

Should we let our political parties do our thinking for us?

When all is said and done, our world can burn, cars will explode, and terrorists will attack. But when we let loyalty to a party or person, replace loyalty to truth, we risk becoming pawns in someone else’s game. True intellectual freedom comes from questioning even the narratives that feel most comfortable—and being willing to change our minds when the evidence demands it. 

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”