After all, telling outright lies is just amateurish; the NYT has been shaping society's perspective on facts for over a century.
That's right, because when Wikileaks revealed high levels of collusion between media outlets and the DNC/Clinton campaign, placing and pulling articles/stories to present a specific narrative, it wasn't out of desire to mislead, rather it was only a desire to 'correct the record'. /s
America and the world have a situation where advertisers need to prey on the Id and emotions of users in order to sell widgets. The advent of the internet crushed the ability of media firms to stay afloat and replaced the ecosystem with many upstarts who also faced the same pressure.
In short there's an overheating attention grabbing system when it comes to the media, which is its own issue that needs to be solved.
Unfortunately there's a new hitherto unbelievable problem, where people fabricate complete and utter lies/fiction and can sail it down the streams of social media.
This is different from the older issue in that these are not major news agencies, but websites masquerading/camouflaging themselves as a news outlet and fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.
A closer model is conspiracy theories.
I agree this is a problem. It also happened rather equally on both sides.
If you really want to know how it works, please take a look at a recent a paper co-authored by Alessandro Bessi. It came out a week ago. It should be accessible for most people on HN.
Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.