Over in the UK, a fairly large percentage of the traditional news outlets available published flagrant lies on a regular basis and still remained extremely popular despite a reputation for the same. Like the Daily Mail, every tabloid in existence, every free paper in existence and arguably a decent percentage of local ones.

And that hasn't changed much since. I mean, the Daily Mail (if Wikipedia is accurate here) was the most popular paper in the world in 1902.

Either way, I suspect the sources the British public have access to haven't exactly gotten much worse (or better) since then.