It wasn't long ago that we didn't even have video, before that we didn't even have pictures. You had the option of believing or rejecting one or more accounts. You also had the option of suspending your belief/disbelief until you felt like corroborating evidence swayed you one direction or the other. Personally speaking, I'm often surprised at how certain people are about the information they ingest.
It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" where points out that people more likely to read a paper critically if it uses a bad fonts, poor layout and some typos. It's not a ground-breaking conclusion, but the studies also implied that people tended to read papers less critically when they looked good. The idea is the mind has the tendency to substitute out critical thinking with heuristic thinking whenever it can. If a paper superficially resembles serious paper from a well-respected journal, there's a real temptation to ease up on the scrutiny because many other signals are suggesting your enhanced scrutiny is a waste of time and energy.
I can't say for sure if our reliance on video and photographs over the last 100 years or so had helped or hurt our critical thinking. It's very easy to argue the hard work of photographers have been critical to bringing important issues and events to our attention. On the other hand, you can argue an over-reliance on images have stripped us from engaging our imagination.
I know in a world of fake news, it would seem like the last thing we need is to engage people's imagination. When we hear the word imagination, most of us think about the skill the lets one fabricate novel stories or alternate realities. We don't think about imagination as a tool that people use to try to figure out our reality. A vivid imagination not only knows how to fabricate alternate realities, but it also knows how to incorporate information from the senses, books, articles and information to test and consider different world views. We need people who can absorb information about how the world works, and can project possible realities as well as many possible futures.
I know I'm going long on this comment, and I don't want to come off as an optimist, but maybe we can use the advent of fake video to cultivate a culture that stops trusting passive sources of information (video) and begins to engage healthy critical thinking instead.
I could be way off the mark and would love to hear someone tell me what I'm missing.