"Or are we all much to clever to be taken in by it?"
No - we are not.
Denzil Washington summed it up perfectly.
"If you want to be uninformed, don't read newspapers. If you want to be misinformed, read newspapers."
It's mostly our fault. There's a new trend online called 'confirmation bias'. There's a subsection of people who believe any story which supports their own particular world view. They will swallow a story whole without doing any fact-checking, or using common sense.
It's also the fault of the Internet. Rubbish news outlets have to fill their pages 24/7 and they do not check stories using professional journalists as they did in the past.
Coupled with that, we have social media sites that distribute fake news stories, which stupid people take for being validated.
It's the perfect storm.