Anyone who wants to pin this on social media hasn't been paying attention to the history of the past 25 years. They've ignored the downfall of the newspaper bus

Anyone who wants to pin this on social media hasn't been paying attention to the history of the past 25 years. They've ignored the downfall of the newspaper business which used to take on the role of educating the American public. They've ignored the trend towards 24/7 TV "news" stations that focus more on inciting panic and fear than they do on educating the public. They've ignored the rollback of regulations that have allowed media conglomerates to homogenize what people are exposed to. The reality is that if there were still journalists doing investigative journalism on par with Woodward and Bernstein and if Americans were getting their news from someone with the gravitas and ethical backbone of Edward R Murrow or Walter Cronkite, these "fake news" stories would be laughed at. But because our schools fail to teach critical thinking and our news either fails to inform people or cannot even interest people enough to watch, social media is the only way we have left for people to consume content and become educated. But since it's an open channel that anyone can participate in, is it any wonder that people would seek to co-opt it for their own purposes? It's little more than a modern day soap box and people have been bloviating their self-serving narratives that way for generations. What's changed isn't social media, it's the lack of adults with professional ethics supplying a baseline reality from which opinions must derive. This is our generation's "yellow journalism" and it's a reminder of what happens when there's no one who takes on and is recognized for playing the role of establishing that baseline of accepted fact. Social media's reach is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.