This past 2016 Christmas season, we had our share of what some have called “fake news” and a lot of them were outright hoaxes.

Two of the most famous was the hacking of Sony’s Twitter feed, announcing Brittney Spears’ death which worked in tandem with the hacking of Bob Dylan’s Twitter which led to the announcement of the singer’s own death. Both were proven to be hoaxes.

Poor Sony, they cannot seem to keep their social media presence secure.

Some of the more severe hoaxes come from our own state government. Former President Barack Hussein Obama, prior to the newly sworn-in President Donald Trump, took to the podcast sphere to bemoan the fact that the media did not help his heir apparent Hillary Clinton win the White House and even said that he could have won an unprecedented third term. Talk about fake news.

While it is true that the media helped President Donald Trump win the Republican primary, fearing that their chosen candidate would loose to a serious contender like Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, or Marco Rubio. However, they shifted when President Trump was the GOP candidate and attacked him, sometimes rightly, other times, not so rightly with gusto that would have have made the George W. Bush and Al Gore election look like a water balloon fight.

Hillary Clinton took it a step further demanding that Congress act on “fake news” websites. That is unprecedented for a former Senator and Secretary of State to call on for a removal of Freedom of the Press.

Granted, there are plenty of fake news websites out there. On the right, Alt-Right websites, conspiracy theorists attack Libertarians and Classic Conservatives. On the left, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, The Young Turks, and others spread false propaganda.

The worst was the recent BuzzFeed article that made all kinds of claims about President Trump and a trip that one of his supporters to Russia to cause havoc. CNN later picked up the story and expanded it.

The problem is, despite that it does exist, who decides what is fake news and what is real news? Does the mainstream media, lie about crime statistics? Who makes stories up about former President Bush? Who pretended they were in war zones, but set up green screens to play make-believe with their viewers?

I think that the people should decide. It is a republic, a government of the people, by the people, and of the people. When it comes to the press, some are going to just go along with whatever the story is, but others will look at the evidence and decide for themselves.

As Thomas Jefferson said, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

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