We don't really have an independent press anymore, and blog-sphere can be trivially gamed by interested and powerful actors. Have we as a civilization ever witnessed such a pervasive disinformation culture?
I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not.
So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us.
(Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.)
[1]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/what-does-jared-kushn...
That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.