I appreciate what you’re saying here; on my side of the Pond we’ve got people trying to influence what the newspapers actually publish by running campaigns to defund them. https://medium.com/@wendycockcroft/who-gets-to-decide-what-acceptable-political-views-are-3d3829fe6c53#.pc3x0dvr6

I find that troubling. Think “slippery” and “slope.”

The elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge is the scourge of identity politics and the echo chamber mentality that goes with it. If you try to shut the fake news sites down, more will spring up and their content will be eagerly shared by people who want to believe it because it appeals to their prejudices.

There’s also the matter of falling newspaper sales; they’re increasingly reliant on appealing to the prejudices of their readers in order to sell papers or gain and keep subscribers. Why, only recently Fox has experienced the horror of people complaining that their news isn’t conservative enough. Hold your noses, read this: http://www.conservapedia.com/Fox_News_Channel and try not to laugh too much. Fox!

I’m about to write another post about this phenomenon. It’s not quite as toxic as that over here but it’s heading that way and I’m not sure what we can do about it bar reminding people that we’ve got more in common than we often realise. But yeah, if you want to address the fake/biased news problem you’re going to have to start at source: prejudiced human beings who prefer “the propaganda” to the news.