Half of the population doesn’t trust the “mainstream” news and get their “facts” from blogs and other unjournalistic, opinionated sources.
These “news” are so much juicer than real news, it spreads like wildfire on the Internet/Facebook etc, especially once it’s put into a text and picture form where people can just simply like something that’s either out of context or usually just completely wrong.
This was a weekly occurance during the elections where everything was made up and facts didnt matter.
People don’t care for facts anymore especially if they go against their viewpoint. They will claim that your fact is wrong and so are your sources, whether it be news, Internet, liberal Wikipedia or liberal factcheckers.
Hence the birth of www.conservapedia.com and similar.
It’s more sad than fascinating.
Edit: on the other hand, you’re right news doesn’t even have to be factual either and is often wrong and or more often simply opinionated, which is wrong in its own right.