Fort's approach was to publicize 'real news' about strange events / phenomena. His methodological baseline was more or less set at including / noting anything that made it into newspapers.
It's now generally accepted that some of the late 19th (and even early 20th) century stuff that's 'classic Forteana' was probably generated by journalists themselves to fill up space. This was particularly common during 'Silly Season' (mid- to late-summer, when many folks were vacationing and there wasn't a lot of mainstream news traffic).
In other words, some percentage (perhaps small, but not 'zero') of the stories that Fort and others promoted in starting the paranormal / weird phenomena genre were 'fake news'.
Insofar as we're obviously immersed in fake news and general sensationalism nowadays, there's every reason to believe young folks continue to be exposed to Fortean (or Fortean-style) stories.
The biggest - and most disturbing - difference between now and back then is that there are entire cottage industries and careers based on generating, elaborating, and / or promoting such stories (and explanations for them). In other words, there are people with a vested interest in disseminating and benefiting from such tales. All the dust kicked up by these follow-on entrepreneurs makes it harder and harder to get to the original facts of a given case.
The other big problem is that younger people are being bombarded with such stuff at an unnervingly rapid pace in 'hot' media (cf. McLuhan) - meaning they aren't afforded the time to reflect on the stories / reports as we could when engaging Forteana in print.
