I'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...
A sea change began with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, seen as birthing modern, generally impartial, journalism. Not absolutely, but relative to earlier periods, quite.
Ironically, widespread national advertising assisted in much of. this, at least for stories not adversely concerning national advertisers. But local squelching of critical news was limited, and occasional nationally critical stories could appear. Watergate was arguably the high-water mark. Corporate ownership massively diluted effectiveness, especially after 1980, though exceptions remain.
Bookending Orwell and Lippmann, I'd suggest I.F. Stone (who calls the 1970s as a high-water mark) and Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909).
There's a huge difference between biased or inaccurate coverage and flat out made up stories. The NYT publishes very few of the latter. Fake news sites publish 100% of the latter. That's a pretty significant difference.
My point is that people have been making the same complaint for a very long time, even back when people paid for news printed on sheets of paper.
"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."
