> unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA.
Citation needed?
The founding fathers owned newspapers & regularly fabricated stories about opponents. Ben Franklin openly wrote about it and he was far from alone.
William Randolph Hearst controlled a significant portion of newspapers & blatantly used used that power to manipulate public opinion, frequently with suspect information.
We went through a whole era of questionable news -- referred to as "yellow journalism":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
The fake news around the Gulf of Tonkin escalated the conflict into a relatively minor to what the US would call the Vietnam War.
The fake news about Iraq WMDs led to the disastrous second golf war.
Bill Clinton stood before the camera & said "I did not have sex with that woman" and his wife, HRC, said it was all "a ring wing conspiracy."
Obama said "if you like your health plan, you can keep it", which several newspapers defended & fact-checked as true, as until much later rating it as lie of the year.
Don't get me wrong. I despise Trump, I despise what's he's doing, and I want to see him removed. But if we're too be critical of him playing loose with facts, we can't be ourselves. And saying this is "peak" when it's likely only a local maxima seems dubious at best.