When I was a junior or senior in college, I wrote a paper on the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, and in discussing one of the Luce magazines I said something like “they published things they must have known were not true,” to which my professor remarked in a side note, “what a shocker!”
I always have been very naïve. Despite what I saw around me, my own internal reading of reality was always realer to me than reality itself, and so I didn’t see what I was seeing. (As I told my daughter recently, I’m an intuitive, and intuitives aren’t necessarily known for having common sense.)
But the point was, and is, that something within me couldn’t and still can’t accept that we should be surrounded by newspapers, magazines, radio and television shows, internet sites, etc. that lie to us.