It is easy to hate the media. In a country where freedom of the press is considered sacred, one would think the responsibility of providing news and information to the public would not be a task taken lightly. But tune into any news channel, and you will quickly see the so-called fourth estate has not been quite the vigilant watchdog it professes to be. So while the talking heads on Fox and CNN drone on and on about whether friendly fist bumps are really secret terrorist handshakes, the real news falls through the cracks. Since the media can no longer be trusted to provide us with the news that actually matters, we decided to do some digging ourselves—and found more than you could imagine. Here are some of the gems we unearthed…