I paid for a newspaper and the only thing factual was the cartoons. Fake news has been around longer than the Internet. Look at Supermarket tabloids. Look at all of the journalists being fired now.
Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well.
Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter and she died. They rushed her to the hospital in their van knocking off the rack on top to get her help because they couldn't wait for an ambulance. She died anyway, and they charged the parents even if they did everything correctly to save her. From that day I learned of fake news.
I was involved with a news event that the local news covered once. They got pretty much every fact wrong. It wasn't due to bias (for example, they described the building as a "warehouse" when it was an obvious office building), it was just sloppiness and failure to check any facts.
You don't really understand how accurate the media is until they report on something you know a lot about. Journalists are generalist laymen with strong incentives to be sensationalist and alarmist. Well researched journalism made by somebody who spent long enough on the story to understand what the hell they're talking about is legitimately rare. Uncommon would be an exaggeration.
One of the things that irks me is the rhetoric that Trump-era distrust of the media is somehow undermining democracy or whatever. If you aren't distrustful of the media you are a naive and dangerous fool. I remember the overwhelming majority of US mainstream media pushing the Iraq war with stories that relied on bias and bogus sources. Interviews with officals & experts that had skin in the game. Blind faith in the media is even more dangerous than the also dangerous posture of not paying any heed to what they have to say.
The parents were not neglectful, they took care of their daughter and took her to the hospital as soon as they noticed the trouble.
Parents were not charged with neglect until after the article was written saying they neglected their daughter. There was no neglect just dirty laundry.
Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well.
Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter and she died. They rushed her to the hospital in their van knocking off the rack on top to get her help because they couldn't wait for an ambulance. She died anyway, and they charged the parents even if they did everything correctly to save her. From that day I learned of fake news.