Unauthorized historian RFB points out that the problem of whom to believe is as old as history:
Last week I broke my sabbatical seclusion to attend a panel that my colleagues in the Department of History had organized on “Understanding the Trump Phenomenon.” The panelists covered a range of themes: climate change denialism, white nationalism, the global failure of capitalism, the latent illiberalism of American culture, and world-wide yearnings towards totalitarianism—all the usual -isms. And then they opened the floor to questions. Like a good fencer, I got my hand up first and said something about the need to think of American culture in more regional and long-range terms, particularly the differences in conceptions of liberty that David Hackett Fisher has shown to be in play, but it was already too late. The room was primed to descend into pessimism and despair, although since we’re talking academics here—fellow professors and graduate students in History for the most part—it was subtle and came out mainly in the kinds of questions asked.
One question in particular had my colleagues on the panel stumped. “How,” one of our graduate students asked, after the conversation had ranged round the many ways in which the progressive liberal experiment in America seemed doomed, “do we know what news sources we can trust anymore?” Her voice rose as she spoke, in that way that I have regularly heard my friends’ voices rise over the past few weeks; even men’s voices go up as their anxieties kick in and they start pleading with the universe to make the results of the election go away. “How do we know what news sources we can trust anymore?” My colleagues made a stab at it: “Go with sources that you have to pay a subscription for.” But mainly they sat and shook their heads, clearly at a loss. They wanted to give the students an answer, but were distressed that they couldn’t name news sources that they themselves trusted fully, not even The New York Times. “It is a wild wild world out there,” they seemed to be saying. “Even we aren’t sure whom we can believe.”
Read the whole thing there. It’s intriguing, particularly as concerns the intellectual rivalry between William, a canon of the Augustinian house of Newburgh, and Geoffrey of Monmouth.