[jyl]

I think the thing to do is to read several news sources - I like the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Economist, AP/Reuters, etc - and look for the factual things that they agree on and for which there appears to be actual evidence. Screen out the adjectives, modifiers, speculation, statements unaccompanied by hard data, and especially the insinuation, innuendo, and opinion.

I agree w/ Cam that the biggest obstacle to getting a balanced and unbiased view of the news is if you read the Op-Ed pieces and think they are news reporting. They're not - they're partisan arguments. I say that even for the editorial columns that I might tend to agree with. I'm willing to believe the same thing as, say, Paul Krugman - but I want to arrive at the opinion myself, not be led to it by clever writing.

Don't know if anyone has read AJ Liebling, but I loved a collection of his pieces published as "The Press". He was a writer for the New Yorker back in the 40s through early 60s. He had a column in which he took the stories that ran in the New York dailies the previous day, and sifted through all the various papers' versions of a particular story and highlighted what was inconsistent, invented, opinion-pretending-to-be-news, and otherwise junk reporting. Great and instructive reading.

Incidentally, what do people think of the Christian Science Monitor? I've recently read a couple of issues and thought the news pieces seemed pretty decent.