I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th.
Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the problem needed to exist before we could address it.
For those interested in this viewpoint I highly recommend reading Clay Shirky's excellent article from 2009 "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"[1].
[1] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
I guess it comes down to how big leaps in information technology act as catalyst for a disruptive reorganization process in society.
Interestingly, the transition from paper to digital media is turning out to have unexpectedly larger implications, disrupting institutional power, control of narrative, facts (and "facts"), knowledge, public awareness, intellectual property, ideologies..
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Pithy lines I liked:
"If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?"
"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."
Added to my reading list:
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Elizabeth Eisenstein)