Last week, we saw significant denial and even shock from the GOP that the country would not only re-elect President Barack Obama, but would do so with 332 electoral votes.

“What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself,” wrote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

“The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality,” is how Ben Domenech, writer and founder of the blog, RedState, phrased the modern conservative dynamic.

Even days after Obama’s win, some on the right were and still are convinced he did so only because of mass voter fraud or missing military ballots.

It seems that biased media outlets like Fox or MSNBC could be to blame as increasingly popular destinations in a news world where consumers are more empowered than ever. Facebook and Twitter feeds are taking over newspapers, and the reader is now entirely in charge of what he or she sees each day — and can largely ignore dissenting voices. People have greater access than ever to information, but they also have the technological ability to shut out anything nonconsensual or that doesn’t reinforce their views.

Should we have this power to censor our own news, to trap ourselves in an alternate reality? In a digital age, we’d be naive to say newspapers should reign — but with a world of information at our fingertips like never before, we should strive to stay objectively informed.

The election may be over, but it’s still easy to get trapped in polarized bubbles of social and biased media. We urge readers to be informed citizens, and to seek information from heterogeneous sources.