Now what is happening? The internet is being polluted with garbage and lies. It hasn’t been good for some time now.

Social media as content aggregation is generally garbage, but it's a far stretch to apply that to the Internet or even the Web as a whole. Don't forget Wikipedia is still a thing and almost every creator of primary source data publishes online.

But if anything can be fake now and difficult to identify as fake, then how can you fact check anything? Only those with the means will be able to produce undeniably real news with great difficulty, which I think will return power to major news companies or something equivalent.

That's kind of always been true. And I agree, we need to find a way to maintain information sourcing organizations (e.g. news) that we can trust as the arbiters of this information. If Washington Post can actually put credible reporters on the ground to confirm something, and I know I can trust WaPo, I can fairly say with some confidence that it's good information.

I think we all (or some of us at least) just need to be willing to pay for this service.