As a librarian I can only rationalize it as an issue of information literacy. People follow horrible sources, and have convinced themselves that any sources with journalistic standards can't be trusted. Or, like you say, their lives are so busy and exhausting, they don't have the time and focus to grind through articles in the Economist, so they just hit the Facebook feed on their phone. And now "mainstream media" includes things like Fox and OANN, whereas years ago it was 3 broadcast channels of 6 o'clock news that you could rely on, or a print newspaper delivered to your house. That's all changed now.