alt Hacker NewsIt is, and always has been, the only possibility. It's up to every individual to check for themselves what is true and what is not, and to decide who to trust for things that they can't check.
The real lesson is this: trust in the source is the most important thing for 99.99% of what you read. You will sometimes read about facts that you can actually verify, but those are mostly useless in the grand scheme - except as a sanity check on the source. For everything else, you have to ultimately trust the source.
Now sure, sometimes you can get lucky and detect certain internal inconsistencies that prove that something can't be true. And to some extent, reading the same information from multiple sources you don't normally trust too much can be a slight signal that it might be true. But these are generally in the minority.
So you test every sip of water you drink? Inspect every road before you drive down it? Check every bathroom product for harmful additives?
Again I am not ignoring reality. But for society to work and for us to live our daily lives with any semblance of sanity, we can't be expected to be fully informed on everything we see, touch, consume, etc. We have to be able to make reasonable assumptions about safety and accuracy or we can't function. And the time it takes to vet stuff is often a privilege (or you can brute force pay your way to safety).
I do not rigorously audit everything I read on wikipedia. I assume a certain baseline of accuracy up to a point, with of course exceptions. Do you pull up 3-4 high quality sources for everything you read or claim? Are you that academic about it?