At long last, the unforgiving light of public anger has been shone upon the ubiquitous problem of "fake news." The American people are finally speaking out about the injustice of the media knowingly filling the Internet with blatant lies, a practice perfected by several unpopular news outlets that one might come across on the Internet. Work has been done to fight this epidemic of "fake news;" Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has even introduced a service to the social networking site that allows users to identify what news is considered untruthful. This way, headlines like "Pope Francis Endorses Donald Trump For President" will be flagged with small labels that tell the reader that the article is unreliable.

This is a good thing.

I was unfortunate enough to misunderstand the conflict at very first glance when "fake news" started making the news. Upon seeing headlines about Facebook's new tool against "fake news," my mind read "Facebook will start identifying which news articles are one-sided and biased." Said articles refer not to the 100% fake ones that Facebook is identifying. They refer to the other 99% of the news media that people actually take time out of their day to pay attention to. News outlets that Republicans love, but Democrats can't stand and refuse to give credibility to, like Fox News, The Blaze, Breitbart News, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and the New York Post. News outlets that Democrats flock to, but Republicans have similar angry feelings toward, like MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, Salon.com, and the Huffington Post. Why do people of one party have true, passionate hatred toward certain news outlets, while the other party can't seem to get enough of them?

It all goes back to a deeper question about human nature and our relationship with the news: Do we pay attention to the world around us so we can become informed and form opinions based on our learnings, or do we pay attention so we can make ourselves feel correct and, therefore, smart? It surely seems to be the latter. It seems that we like to surround ourselves with people who are paid to agree with us instead of people who inform us. This type of journalism might be attributable to the divide our country is feeling so intensely.

Let's take a sadly common example of a news story: an African-American teenager is shot by a white policeman. Let's assume no backstory, no character development, no details, nothing. For all the public knows, the victim could be anything from a criminal attacking the policeman to an innocent high school valedictorian helping an old lady cross the street. The same goes for the policeman, who could either be a Neo-Nazi or the president of the local NAACP chapter. The public knows nothing yet, as no details have been released from the incident. What headline will the Huffington Post make about this incident? Probably something along the lines of "White cop murders unarmed black youth in cold blood." The article itself would quickly paint the cop as a racist in order to feed the Democratic Party's "White people are racist" narrative, which has ever so clearly caused a racial divide in this country.

And how would Fox News report on this tragedy? Well, Sean Hannity would probably introduce the story by attacking the liberal media for its attempts to paint cops as racists, and would use it as an example of how the Democratic media is encouraging a "War on Cops." Republicans watching Hannity's Fox show would, in turn, gain more fuel for their contempt toward the Democratic Party.

Democrats would then call Hannity and all of his viewers racist for defending "racist" cops and their murderous ways, and Republicans would fight back by accusing the media of inciting resentment toward not just cops but all white people, and it goes back, and forth, and back, and forth. In the end, everybody ends up somebody's enemy. It's like a brother and sister giving each other wet willies and pulling each others' hair and tattling on each other to their parents. Both sides are waving "Black Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter" flags, to symbolize how the opposing side is one of murderer-apologists.

This is what we call the news. And it's all because of ratings. The truth is that news doesn't get ratings. Propaganda does.

These one-sided news networks get the highest ratings in journalism because they tell Americans exactly what they want to hear. They turn news stories into reasons why Republicans and Democrats can think they're correct in their political affiliations. They give us something to retweet, which is the common millennial's way of saying "I told you so!" to all of his or her Twitter followers who disagree with them. All of the highest-rated news sources in America (Fox, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) lean toward a political party, in varying degrees of bias. When the New York Times publishes an article endorsing Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, or when the New York Post publishes an article endorsing Donald Trump's campaign, can we be so sure that, when we read those papers, we're reading the news, and not propaganda?

How can we be so sure that we're making informed decisions in the voting booth when the person who writes the news we read wants us to think a certain way? What does it say about our values when we the people care more about feeling smart than making the right choices? Why are we tackling "fake news," but zipping our lips about the everyday propaganda that actually influences the American voter? And, perhaps most importantly... Why do we so gleefully drink the Kool-Aid we're served? Do we even care?

Probably not, in the cases of most people. The idea of political discussion is one that is perverted into something more materialistic than intellectual. We read the news to look smart, not to be smart.