epistemic schism, real-time

I saw a tweet by Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres accusing dissident journalist Glenn Greenwald of being a "useful idiot" for believing the fake backstory of recently elected Republican congressman George Santos.

I know who the first two people are, and I've never heard of the third. I Google his name and the first couple of results are hits to legacy media articles (NYT, WaPo, BBC, CNN) containing a litany of accusations that paint Santos as a lying conman who invented or stretched the truth of every line of his CV.

Now, someone who still had an iota of trust in legacy media outlets over the last two years would reflexively conclude that the man is a fraud. However, given that the balance of power in the legislative branch of the U.S federal government now hangs in the air, combined with the current atmosphere in which politics and truth have become wholly untethered, one is led to a crossroads and forced to choose a side: Who is lying? How shall I discern fact from fiction? What is true and what is false?

Is everything now potentially a coordinated psyop conducted by a cabal of political operatives, or have a series of spectacular failures on the part of establishment media institutions over the last several years simply dissolved our collective grasp on reality?