@nic221 my tentative defense of this kind of misinformation is that some of it may be necessary to maintain some social stability. I'm pretty sure Cronkite was the high point of it, and that was a property of the media landscape at the time.

Truth is important and we keep discovering more of it, faster, but large societies can only assimilate so much information in so little time.

The new forms of media haven't crystallized yet, so they are more disruptive, and this makes highbrow misinformation both more obvious and less effective.