[jyl]

There are some good, thoughful print media sources. The Economist is my favorite, IMO the best English-language news weekly in the world. BusinessWeek is so-so. Time and Newsweek are fishwrap.

Figure out the biases of your media sources, and be accordingly skeptical. I read the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal but am aware of how they lean.

TV and cable media are quite unreliable, in my opinion. Fine for breaking news, entertainment, pandering, baiting, and soft stories; not for investigation or analysis. Radio is similar. That goes for Rush Limbaugh as well as for Al Franken.

Internet is good for hunting down very specific data points. Reliability decreases rapidly as you go from hard numerical data to qualitative "facts" to anecdotal stories. Also good for different points of view, if you treat them like the slightly inebriated conversations you'd drift in and out of at a party - maybe interesting, but you wouldn't put your own money down without a lot more research.

On some subjects, you just can't find your own information, so I end up just having to trust the whatever the current Administration is. My rule is that if they lie to me once (on a major issue, I know there's little "white lies" all the time), I'll never take their word again on anything. (Like the WMDs . . . )