Jeff Desjardins — Chart: The Fake News Problem

Analysis beneath the chart in the article.

Visual Capitalist
Chart: The Fake News Problem
Jeff Desjardins

Christopher Preble — Americans Aren't Buying What Fact Checkers Are Selling

So, in our current state, who is the arbiter of actual truth from mere speculation? What institution or person can help us sort out what is true or false? Answer, no one. So everyone merely asserts, and people believe who and what they want to believe. Blog A’s facts are just as good as Blog B’s. Thus the phenomenon of, yes, fake news.

Indeed, increasingly it seems that a fact is only believed as such if it advances one’s preconceived notions (as noted by Stephen Schwartz). This is not confined merely to Donald Trump supporters, but the most notorious cases of beliefs widely disconnect from reality seem to be.

This is what happens when at elite becomes outrageously corrupt and untrustworthy, the society becomes dysfunctional as trust breaks down generally.

Historically, the failure of the state internally or defeat externally is not far away.  It's not by accident that this post in in The National Interest, a publication on international relations, strategy and defense.

The National Interest
Americans Aren't Buying What Fact Checkers Are Selling
Christopher Preble | vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute

John Andrews — Corporate Media: The Real Fake News Specialists

America has always had "yellow journalism," but the situation deteriorated seriously when corporate media, following Rupert Murdoch, adapted the tabloid model to generate revenue through infotainment. When "truthiness" replaced truth, propaganda was swift to follow. 

The success of this depends on public trust. The Big Lie is so outrageous that the public simply doesn't consider that their government could be lying to them on this scale. However, after several exposures public trust declines and the media becomes suspect even with they happen to be reporting the facts and telling the truth about them.

This problem with British propaganda is serious. Many people think that propaganda is something only the Russians do, or the Syrians, or the North Koreans, or any other nation we’re supposed to despise. It’s not something we would ever do. And that’s the main reason why British propaganda is so much more successful than less advanced countries: most of us instinctively trust and believe our corporate news providers; most never think for one second our news could be wrong or, horror of horrors, deliberately misleading propaganda. But that’s exactly what most of it is; any national newspaper can supply limitless examples every day of the week.

Dissident Voice
Corporate Media: The Real Fake News Specialists
John Andrews, British author and activist