In my opinion, fake news isn’t nearly as prevalent or as dangerous as news that mostly tells the truth as a technicality or formality, but is presenting a radically skewed and biased narrative.

That kind of dishonesty fools even people on the upper end of cognitive ability.

Modern news cycles are edited together like reality TV shows. The bias is for sensationalism, and for supporting and validating the worldview of the journalists and financial backers involved.

The media’s gestalt can be a massive deliberate lie and con on the entire population, and they can easily achieve that without ever telling a single individual lie.

Which isn’t to say they don’t sometimes resort to flat-out lying, there’s a good amount of that too. But mostly what the “credible” news sources do is take a large selection of truths, and sum them up to a whole that’s deliberately engineered to deceive everybody for the sake of sensational, political and social bias.