> We've lost the bastion of professional journalism.

I don't read it this way at all.

There are still fantastic journos all over the place. Now, you can find fantastic journalists at BuzzFeed -- they just aren't the ones writing the listicles. You can find fantastic journalists at WaPo and NYT, but they are a strict subset of all article writers at their institution. You can find entire media outlets which are largely fantastic journalists, such as ProPublica.

We've only lost the idea that all news/media writers on the internet are "journalists".

> We need someone to vet this stuff for us.

The world is more complicated than it used to be.

We need more media literacy of readers. In the past, there were media gatekeepers who were very educated and (debatably) ethical. But with the democratization of media, there are no fences or gates anymore so people simply bypass the gatekeepers.

The institutions of our world are changing. Not only the specific names of institutions and the new generation of people manning them, but altering what it means to be an institution. The "populist" movements worldwide (including the current Trump+Bannon / Bernie / Brexit / anti-EU, and the Arab Spring + similar revolutions against the entrenched powered interests) are eroding the long-established institutions. Media consumers feel the sand shifting between their feet and are afraid of all media and institutions right now. Some of these populist movements are using this fear of change and fear of media to their advantage.

And then again, a fantastic journalist is not the only thing you need. You also need to have editors to keep journalists honest and ethical, even in a time when news outlets have to compete with "free" by thinning their editor ranks and outsourcing "journalism" to non-staff citizens.

You're last paragraph betrays any point you're trying to make. The world is not more complicated, it's wearisome to hear people use it as an excuse. I personally think there's a valid point that journalism has eroded to near nothing. There are a handful of sites on the internet that serve as defacto sources of authoritative news. News that can be trusted. Not fox, not cnn, not msn, certainly not yahoo . We live in an era of marketing, tabloid and celebrity Sensationalism masquerading as news. It's clearly, as the present article indicates, the situation is being actively exploited by state actors, to the detriment of us all.

I just realized that the well known news hoaxer going by the name of Sorcha Faal[1], who has been publishing since 2003, always claims that his sources for his stories are "rumors circulating around the Kremlin". How much more legit is this than all the "anonymous sources say" articles in the NYT and Washington Post, especially since the election? Sorcha Faal specialized in plausible sounding conspiracy theory, at least to those inclined to paranoia, usually based on recent events. WP and NYtimes seem to have started doing the same it seems.

[1]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sorcha_Faal

journalists have processes to check sources. Don't buy into this 'mainstream is fake news' nonsense that's desensitizing the US to facts

Reuters.com is pretty good, too.