While looking at my Facebook newsfeed last Wednesday, I stumbled across something that caught my eye in the ‘trending’ column. I believe it said something along the lines of “12th Dead Sea Scrolls cave found”. Quite interested in this area of subject, I clicked the link and it took me to this webpage: http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/33424 where the homepage was titled “The Hebrew University of Jerusalem”. I started to read the article which proceeded to say that a 12th Dead Sea Scroll cave had been found by Dr. Oren Gutfeld and Ahiad Ovadia from the Hebrew University. Similar to the 8th Dead Sea Scroll cave, no actual scrolls were found within, instead, there were storage jars and lids dating to the Second Temple period, alluding to the fact that at one point, there were Dead Sea Scrolls within. The article continued to inform us that scholars believed the scrolls had been looted in the century prior and thus weren’t present in the cave.
Finding this discovery quite fascinating, I went to google and typed in “12th Dead Sea Scroll cave” to see what else was out there. Websites I weren’t familiar with (besides AOL) popped up and I tried avoiding them, not knowing if they’d be credible sources. Eventually, I stopped my 15-minute search and decided to call it quits, not being able to find a known reputable news source. This moment in time had me thinking a lot about all the fake news that’s constantly being spouted through media and more. It’s hard for most people, especially the uneducated and the youth, to be able to weed out what they should and should not trust. There’s also a whole other aspect to this problem, and it’s that everyone is going to have their own opinion on what ‘reliable’ news is. Conservatives could believe everything that comes out of Fox News while liberals do the same with NPR and the New York Times. This is a problem that I have no answer to, though I wish I did.