What's changed is that we have more leaked documents, more ability for whistleblowers to mass broadcast anonymously, and more tools for immediately uncovering discrepancies in people's stories. So the rumor mill probably is a little more accurate than in prior eras, but it was probably already reasonably reliable even before the advent of WikiLeaks or whatever.
The other difference is that people now have a lot more incentive to turn to the rumor mill (e.g. r/dncleaks, r/wikileaks, r/the_donald) since the mainstream media has been blatantly ignoring a lot of this stuff, and with the advent of Facebook they can spread whatever they find a lot faster.
I sometimes have to turn to foreign news like Russia Times (RT), Al Jazeera, and the Israeli Haaretz news (and news from many other countries) to see news stories that are effectively blocked out in the USA. I do look with appropriate scepticism at all foreign and domestic news sources, but when major stories are not covered in domestic news sources there is no choice but to look around the web.
It drives me a little crazy when friends who watch MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, etc. think that they are getting a full and accurate picture of world events.
Um, that is, numerically more are provably correct, not more as a percent. There are far more conspiracy theories (of which I am aware) than there were in the past. I don't know that the fraction that are provably correct is any higher now.