Found this while browsing You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNshmEEZefE
The BBC showed this episode of its 'Thirty Minute Shorts' series, in 1968. Starring Donald Pleasence and Nigel Davenport, in a chillingly plausible tale of how mainstream news is ' faked' by a ' small group at the top' . As Donald Pleasence says, "News is the most highly developed form of fiction. The most difficult' .
While it's an fictional example, I have little doubt real 'fake' news works in a similar way, and it makes me wonder how bad it got before the internet started really taking off. This is why censorship is so important to them.
The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama)
wikipedia https://archive.fo/Dgw1w
Others blamed the radio audience for its credulity. Noting that any intelligent listener would have realized the broadcast was fictional, the Chicago Tribune opined,
"it would be more tactful to say that some members of the radio audience are a trifle retarded mentally, and that many a program is prepared for their consumption."
I think that was a deliberate experiment, one that succeed well enough for them to start expanding on.
i suspect it was an early version of Project Blue Beam,
fake alien invasion unites the world,
under the guise of the sky blue banner of the United Nations!
I still listen to it so now and then.
https://tube.connect.cafe/watch?v=OJFIBdcKDEo