> What Veritas does consistently is to alter material to misrepresent its subjects. That's called lying and fraud.
Only if you call editing the videos - which literally every other news outlet does, nobody publishes full unedited raw footage in the reports, it's just not how it is done - "altering material". Otherwise, Veritas publishes exactly what their subjects said or wrote or otherwise did.
> But counterfeit data should not be part of it.
Except Veritas didn't counterfeit anything. On the contrary, as we now know, the diary that FBI attacked them over was entirely genuine - and they still didn't use it, btw. On the other hand, only in the recent years we have witnessed a number of cases where false (and as we now know, with the advance knowledge of their falsity) statements were published about the veracity of certain data, and various accusations of foreign interference and such were thrown around, including by very prominent mass media, and so far I did not hear anybody even apologizing for that, let alone excluded from the "marketplace of ideas", despite those acts of counterfeiting. I wonder why is that. Maybe because the exclusion power is wielded by their friends, and their counterfeits help those friends stay in power?
> We are awash in information and now suffering from disinformation campaigns (straight out of KGB, comrade)
And the same people who are managing these disinformation campaigns are claiming people who trying to get information past them are illegitimate, not real journalists and thus deserve suppression at the hands of law enforcement (because the First Amendment has the little known "y'all folks realize this all is only for real journalists, right?" clause). They are the ones who purport to "fight disinformation" and claim extraordinary powers of speech control to do that. A regime where such powers exist are not democracy - at least not any that is worth of the name.
> The government doesn't seem to be stopping you from consuming Fox, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, etc.
They are trying (so far by pressuring social networks and other distribution channels to suppress them) but so far they are failing. The First Amendment is pretty strong still, thanks Founding Fathers. But nothing is impossible in politics, and with enough effort it can be - and is being - eroded and ultimately destroyed. In countries where there's no such strong protections, it is plausible that we will witness this within a decade or sooner.