I would hope that we have the capability to worry about and address both of these very important things simultaneously. I concur that Fox News, Infowars, Newsmax and similar are a threat to democracy and civil society as well.
This is after all why programs keep getting higher latency even though chips have gotten faster for decades. If we could solve more than one problem in a way that's concurrent with each of the problems (computing "parallelly"? dunno), we wouldn't have this problem.
In conclusion, we must solve a problem that isn't the topic of this article before we address the topic of this article.
(Note: I'm hungry, so I won't be able to respond to this thread for an indeterminate amount of time...)
Edit: clarification made before I started to deal with my hunger problem (obviously)
While I agree with you about those specific outlets, I also have no doubt that any powers introduced to restrict them would eventually be turned against the liberal-leaning media as well.
Doesn't mean it's incorrect, though. Doing something is tricky, for sure, but doing nothing is fatal.
Once you have the state deciding and enforcing what is and isn't true, any hope for a liberal democracy is gone.
Once you give the state the power to arrest people for spreading "verifiable lies", you now have to determine what "verifiable" means and who does the verifying. It's inevitably going to change a lot depending on the political beliefs of those in power.
It's the halting problem, "who watches the watchers?", etc. There's no way to have the state determining what's true and what's a lie, even in the most seemingly obvious cases, while maintaining freedom of speech and a free society more generally.
Apologies though if you feel I've misrepresented your position.
People think Al Qaeda, ISIS etc are a huge threat, and yes they're very concerning... But you know who's even better and motivated at killing Americans? Other Americans.
This has been a known thing since long before Timothy McVeigh, a Ryder truck and Oklahoma City in the mid 1990s. It has not been adequately addressed in domestic law enforcement.