You can and in my country we tried to:

1. we reported as much fake news as possible
2. we added comments and data that prove the articles wrong
3. we created websites for fact checking which we can disseminate
4. we created independent news agencies funded by the people through recurrent donations
5. we started creating online funds for democracy - raising money for education, media camps and schools
6. we got more involved in attending voting polls - reducing voting fraud
7. we contacted the outlets sponsors and demanded the pull of their commercials and campaigns
8. we made browser extensions to weed out certain external paid propaganda websites
9. we made adwords campaigns targeting the parliament building on google maps (yes it's possible) to let the officials know we watch them.

All of these endeavors were from very to hugely successful; read my other long comment to this article for more info & i promise i will make an article on this in the next few days. There's a lot of data I have that I believe would be unseen before on steemit.

We are not short of ways to combat it, it's the manpower that's needed :)