We don't need to look any further for this than ISIS. Not only is ISIS controlling the whole world's talking points by carefully crafting what news they'll release, but they're spreading stories all the time that are completely bogus. Look, for example, at this story about ISIS crucifying one of its own members for corruption: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/06/27/.... It all started with a tweet from a now-deleted Twitter account, because ISIS wanted to spread the idea of how intense they are and how strongly they fight their perceived evil. So they plant a story about how they crucified one of their own members. Every media organization knows that's free pageviews, so they report it.
But look at the feature photo in that story, which constitutes most of the "tip" from the tweet. Do a reverse image search and you find the original source: It's a Danish Roman Catholic reenacting Christ's crucifixion in the Philippines. http://d.pr/i/183Sf. The story of the ISIS crucifixion was made up out of thin air, based on a photo that was easily discoverable (and in the AFP database), but now the lie is in every mainstream media publication I can think of, from CNN and The Telegraph to The Guardian and the New York Times. They didn't even have time for a reverse image search. And ISIS wins.
A lot of what my startup does is fact-check stuff that's going on in the media (it's a newsroom for the Internet - https://grasswire.com), and every media organization (and I mean every) from Al Arabiya and the New York Times to Newsweek to Rolling Stone and New York Magazine are quite frequently full of inaccuracies and intentional lies. Sometimes people catch these lies, a few people freak out for <24 hours, and we all forget about it.
The notion that a publication's relevance is based purely on its accuracy is, in my opinion, false. We don't have the time or energy to process which media organizations we trust and which have mislead us, because, unless we're ruthlessly sitting behind a computer fact-checking stuff, we probably don't even know that they're making mistakes in the first place. For every one person The Daily Mail pisses off by publishing its false stories, 100 people are reading it and saying, "Wow, The Daily Mail does some daring reporting." Very few people care anymore -- we don't have time to.
In Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, Ryan Holiday talks about how easy it is to get lies to spread throughout the Internet, and thereby all of mainstream media. The premise is very simple. You find someone at the bottom of the press pyramid - the person responsible for putting out 4 or 5 articles a day so that his or her publication can get enough pageviews to stay alive. There's not a chance that person can do any sort of verification. You send them a "tip," get a few smaller blogs to write about it, and the snowball starts rolling.
These publications all read each other, and most of them just want to pick up stories from each other and ride the wave of whatever's going viral. That's not just cat videos; that's stories about ISIS and Russian fighters in Ukraine and what we consider "hard news." The stuff we all talk about in the United States is mostly driven by PR folks who are carefully planting stories that push their agenda forward. In most other countries it's even worse. Few of my Russian friends are even aware of the fall of the Rouble and the pending collapse of their own economy.
I don't know what the solution is (I'm trying to find/create one), and I don't want to pretend like this has only happened since the Internet came into existence, but I find most people put way too much trust in the press machine we've created. I would like to think that somewhere there are independent reporters and people who are digging up stories, but I've come to realize that most stories aren't ever dug up - they're pitched.