That's the problem with journalists. They're seldom held accountable for the crap they report, which is often factually inaccurate, and then after they have destroyed reputations and lives, all in the name of clicks and ratings, they move on to the next story du jour. They control the media, so they control the story and ultimately "reality". Reminds me of a quote by Philip K. Dick:
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
In this instance, journalists do not so much manipulate words - the politically correct in our society do that - but they manipulate data/facts. And by manipulating facts (remember the completely fabricated story CNN ran about a massacre in Vietnam?) journalists (the media) control reality because they control what people read and subsequently believe. Reality is malleable. And when a person's reality is made up of non-sequiturs and fabrications, you get this:
"But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms."
-PKD circa 1978.
If you read anything by PKD you'll soon be astonished at how prescient he was when it came to how technology would shape the very worlds (realities) we live in - or think we live in.