Man this is such a serious topic of our times.....Pretty much everything is being gamed and most things (especially centralized) are literally being run by money. News is just advertising now, not journalism.
Its so hard unless ur a super intelligent person spending lots of time researching or a hacker to find anything close to the truth.
We are plagued with a lot of that here on Steemit, though its not nearly as bad. Mostly due to it being on the blockchain so shady activity can be much better tracked and exposed.
Also when there are people like you on here who know how to use the blockchain, care about the truth and this community we get a LOT of help finding more accurate truth.

Thanks for this very important post and also for making Steemit a quality place. If it were not for people like you Steemit wouldn't really be that great even though it is a blockchain.

SteemON!