If we are living in the Age of Information, in an economy driven by digitalization and powered by a knowledge-based society, it’s becoming woefully clear that America has a currency problem.

That is, if the worldwide currency is information, the made-in-America variety isn’t commanding the kind of market share that inspires confidence. Witness Congressional negotiators on Wednesday approving an initiative to track and combat foreign propaganda amid growing concerns that Russian-sponsored “fake news” and disinformation impacted last month’s presidential election and continues to threaten national security.

The disconnect is real, and it apparently runs deep and wide. Michael T. Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, apparently can’t currently distinguish between an independent news outlet like CNN and a state sponsored operation like Russia Today, which gets its entire $247 million budget from the Kremlin.

If the notion that a decorated and respected former military intelligence officer doesn’t recognize the difference between independent news media and a Russian propaganda mill is alarming, it should be.

But here’s the catch: the problem with anti-propaganda campaigns run by the government is that they all ultimately want to do the same thing: smash any narrative that contradicts the official account of events. That’s fine and dandy until you recall how often our government’s official narrative has been shattered so far this century:

n America doesn’t torture — unless you count a sprawling and brutal CIA program that abused more than 100 prisoners between 2002 and 2008, and about which the agency misled Congress and the public for years after it was first exposed.

n Americans have the right to privacy and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures — unless you count a secret NSA wiretapping program between 2001 and 2007 that collected and analyzed millions of domestic telephone records without warrants, and operated without any significant oversight whatsoever.

n America reveres and cares for its veterans — unless you count the 2014 scandal revealing that more than 120,000 were either left waiting or never got care from the VA, as administrators falsified data and kept secret records to conceal prolonged waits for appointments.

Legitimate criticism and critical reviews of the government’s official narrative were essential components in bringing each of these revelations to light. And in each case an independent and professional news outlet (The Associated Press, The New York Times, CNN) broke the story.

But Americans, who increasingly get their news via social media platforms and from alternative “news” sites and blogs, apparently have less and less faith in those institutions. In late November The Washington Post reported independent researchers found that Russian propaganda was reaching at least 15 million Americans, and their articles were viewed more than 213 million times during election season.

The problem isn’t that Americans are reading these articles. It’s that they’re actually believing them. And there’s no readily-apparent answer to the questions at hand: How did so many Americans come to trust Kremlin-sponsored information more than reports from independent American news outlets? What did the American news media do to provoke such a dangerous migration in trust?

In a recent column, Bloomberg News’s Leonid Bershidsky lays out the choice before us: “These are inconvenient questions, and it’s harder to ask them than to get involved in a misguided war on propaganda that ends up stigmatizing legitimate criticism and media diversity.”

That’s a fair critique and a thoughtful warning to those who think the antidote to widespread distrust in government and news is to deploy government-run spin doctors to war with conspiracy theorists.

Disinformation and propaganda are insidious threats to American democracy — but that’s because fewer Americans than ever before (32 percent, according to Gallup) trust the media to report news “fully, accurately and fairly.”

We would be better served trying to repair these relationships at home than spending time and money ($160 million over two years is the price tag of Congress’ anti-propaganda initiative) fighting a fake news war with the Kremlin.