Fairly Unbalanced

Welcome to the Post-Facts Era.
You know it's here, but where'd you hear it?
It's not just an issue for the ivory tower:
There's more to “What's true?” than “Who has power?”

You want to be even-handed and hear all sides,
But you'll catch lunatics if your net's too wide.
Can you trust the answers, or is that a trick question?
Does cred go up with more Twitter mentions?

Maybe the reporters have thumbs on the scales.
Will that even matter if the medium fails?
Is this the fake scandal or is it the other?
Do we long for the days when brother fought brother?

The House is divided? That cannot stand.
That side should cave to our demands.
We outsource our thinking like corporate shills,
And then wonder why we still get the bills.

They play the fact checkers like they're playing fact chess,
Why tell the whole truth when you get more for less?
“We need dirty tactics 'cause the other side's worse!”
Says the other side, too, only in reverse.

If we follow these footsteps we'll just get more,
One round's not enough, we need an encore.
We have to start asking how we know what we know,
It's the only way out of this dead-end show.

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The above is my entry for the Poetry Dice Challenge Week 24, wherein you have to write a poem on the theme of Balance inspired by the images on these dice:

How the images appeared in the poem:
Scale → Thumbs on the scales
Skyscraper / Office Building → Corporate
Castle tower → Ivory Tower, also the rook in chess
Moon → Lunatics
Question Mark → Trick Question
Arrows pointing in many directions → All sides
Footprint → footsteps → follow these footsteps
Hand → Even-handed, also the thumb on the scales
House → The House is divided, a reference to the partisanship of the House of Representatives in Congress but also a reference to Abraham Lincoln's “A house divided against itself cannot stand”

Originally the poem was going to be a bit more of a meditation on how to interact with the news of the day given the realities of politically-motivated reasoning that everyone is susceptible to: The other side looks clearly wrong to me, but that's also what I look like to them, and we can't both be right, so how do we figure out what's really true? Why are people so weirdly certain about things they can't possibly know, like the “true motivations” of their political opponents? During composition it sort of evolved into more generalized frustration with politics and media, which I think still works. I was considering an alternate title “A fox in both their henhouses”, a mashup of “A pox on both their houses” and “A fox in the henhouse”, kind of a reference to the idea that maybe silos and echo chambers have allowed good rhetorical arguers to gain primacy over actual policy-thought everywhere. But I thought the “fox” reference might make people think I was singling out Fox News. (Calling the poem “Fairly Unbalanced” may run that risk, too, I was aiming more for something along the lines of both sides of the political divide have gone crazy so the imbalanced behavior has been distributed fairly).