uhhh… i would respond differently to your rhetorical question…

there’s never been greater distrust of legacy media, and the fact that you can’t trust everything you read on the internet has been a trope for decades

Maybe it's a useful thing to ponder why faked photoshopped pictures were never a big problem in human life. I think maybe it's because we use a lot of pictures in our lives, sure. But ultimately we have so much context that a fake would be easy to detect and therefore irrelevant. At most people used photoshop to alter images of documents.

Should written language not exist as well? We can never say for sure that the words are true