Top 4 Reasons the 2016 Election Could End in Chaos

4. Few Trust the Media Anymore, Often With Good Reason

If we did have an extremely close election, with both candidates claiming victory and/or evidence of election interference from a third party, is there any single news organization that a majority of Americans can all agree is an objective source of truth regarding the election’s outcome?

As noted by the US News, trust in media is at an all-time low. A lack of credibility by most major news sources in Americans isn’t necessarily an immediate problem if, again, the election is a landslide and they will all basically say the same thing, but what if it’s close and they aren’t in agreement? What if there has been evidence of illegal activity?

Over the recent decades, the separation between news and entertainment has become blurred, and those traditional sources of information dubbed “main stream media” have become increasingly suspect in their objectivity of facts. Numerous cases of both liberal and conservative bias in cable news channels have become readily apparent, with evidence of much more “objective oriented” goals in how they cover politics than merely trying to get at unbiased truth. For example, take the recent Wikileaks information that the media is coordinating with Hillary Clinton.

The Republican side is certainly not any better. Over recent years, they have responded to the suspected liberal bias against them not by taking a high road of insisting on integrity and objectivity in news reporting, but by fighting fire with nukes. The conservative-candidate bias of FOX News is off the charts, and this year, the Republican campaign has gone so far as to actually merge with the ultra-right-wing Breitbart News. How long until we have a state-run media, which is exactly in opposition to the spirit of the 1st amendment and free speech being a check to power?

As the lack of trust continues to erode between mainstream media and the average citizen, Americans have turned to the internet to gather additional “news.” Unfortunately, instead of the internet offering an alternate source of unbiased information in a large number of cases it seems people are simply finding even more extreme peddlers of bias to serve as echo chambers for their most fearful, paranoid, and extremist tendencies. Disinformation is defined as “the willful manipulation of information to achieve a desired outcome.” It’s somewhat telling that the word was only accepted by English dictionaries in the 1980s, right when internet was being created. The void of trust with traditional media has been filled through a sea of openly biased and fraudulent political propaganda sites.

All of this collectively just means that no one is really sure who to trust anymore. And if no source of news, or any other power or person can be trusted to be objective on a day to day basis, what happens in a crisis? Given the mounting craziness against a clean and sensible end to the 2016 election, what can we do as individual Americans to mitigate the chance of chaos now and into the future?

The answer…