The media has been notoriously lying for quite some time. Whether actively (I recently heard a story of some news anchors paying off some guys with Kalashnikovs

The media has been notoriously lying for quite some time. Whether actively (I recently heard a story of some news anchors paying off some guys with Kalashnikovs to start shooting when their live segment on TV came up because the armed strife they were reporting on wasn't quite real enough) or passively (swallowing someone else's propaganda as if it were a fact), there has been bullshit floating around the media for decades. I think back in the day it was in some ways harder to spot - your only other frame of reference was the observable reality around you. So for instance when (in my parents time in a communist country) the TV reported that the shoe factory was exceeding its planned output by 140%, but when you went to the shop there were no shoes in your size and a line around the block you could put two and two together. But many news stories evade such simple comparisons with daily reality. Today we have the internet where both alternative facts are available (i.e. people actually on the scene taking pictures) as well as alternative journalism piecing those facts together in a completely different way. Most clever people try to triangulate between these different viewpoints to arrive at some conclusion hopefully closer to reality... The interesting question is what are the consequence of this? I think there is a rapidly shrinking pool of trust towards our institutions and corporations. I believe that a lot of the issues with the coronavirus (especially the vaccines) are directly attributable to this. If someone who has been blatantly lying to you for decades tells you "take this medication, it's safe, trust me" and keeps repeating it over and over again, I think one can sympathise with those who feel entirely suspicious about it.