Historically, misinformation spread due to lack of reliable communications technology (news took a while to travel around the world). Now, misplaced trust in media and abuse of technology spread misinformation.
Today everything is written down, much if not most of the information we receive is via written documents, especially online. There is a level of bias and intentional misleading that is often hard to believe. Hearing something from a well informed friend seems far more credible than a news story now, since you can't depend on journalists to research and relate the available information without intentionally withholding, minimizing, or amplifying to create a narrative that is in line with what they want people to believe.
I'm not screaming 'fake news' here. An example would be an NPR story that claimed a certain person, previously employed in a professional field, was 'unable to find work' for 6 years. Clearly the person had struggled with substance abuse, but that was never mentioned, and the narrative was 'In This Economy' despite the fact that if you show up drunk to job interviews that is an essential fact in a human interest story about a person being unable to find work. The journalist and/or their editors wanted to write a story about how hard it is to find a job 'in this economy', so they hid facts that didn't reinforce that narrative.