It feels like you just described war propaganda. Americans lie one way, the Russians the other. The better question is why are we in a war over current events (to your point over the news). Left propaganda and Right propaganda, for some invisible war.
The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs::
Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.
While I don't doubt that some of it is, calling it propaganda implies a deliberateness to me.
Most of this stuff isn't lies. It's different groups of people focusing on different parts of the same events. Most of the time when you get two competing narratives for an event, neither are actually dishonest, they're just a collection of events that tell a particular story that is of particular concern to a group. Usually the events all actually happened but their importance and relatedness are re-arranged.
> Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.
Already in 1928, Edward Bernays' book on PR and marketing was named Propaganda.
Another interesting point is that the term propaganda comes from the Latin "propaganda fide" (propagation of faith). Nowadays it seems to just be called evangelization in the Vatican and elsewhere.
The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs::
Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.
Edit: this actually got downvoted, yikes