At some point, news quality drops below a threshold and readers who value quality stop reading, at which point they find more reliable sources of news. Therefor

At some point, news quality drops below a threshold and readers who value quality stop reading, at which point they find more reliable sources of news. Therefore, creating hoaxes encourages fact-checking due to the threat of reduced readership, if too many hoaxes are put forth as news. We need more scrupulous journalists, not more scrupulous community members. It's like you're blaming people who bribe cops for police corruption. What's needed is police who won't take bribes, not to have people stop attempting to bribe them. More hoaxes, I say. Let's see how quickly web "journalists" can be pushed into doing some actual work.