Well there's bias everywhere. I don't really get my news off of tv though.

This might not help but...

... I learned a while back that the more news sources you use/engage, the more likely that your overall picture will be more complete. What's more, hearing the different slants different companies place common stories can sometimes be hilarious.

And yea, they're all slanted in one way or another.

Yeah, bias is unavoidable. Even when you take out the corporate/government/insanity biases to be found, the individual journalist is necessarily biased to some degree.

You might just want to get a few newspaper subscriptions, NYT, Chicago Tribune, ect, and read those. Between the various opinions, you'll find some degree of truth.

For economic news, I recommend The Economist. The magazine is definitely slanted towards freemarketeering, but otherwise, the magazine covers deep economic issues quite well, and doesn't require a MA in Economics to understand.

I agree: Bias is inevitable, and not necessarily because journalists are bad at what they do or anything - it's just simply a part of having an outside source gather the information and compose the story. Most journalists are generalists - they write a lot of stories on whatever they are told to and as such they don't necessarily (in fact, rarely do they) have very much of a background in the subject at hand. I used to write for a small town newspaper and I'm certain that the locals were appalled at my first rodeo story! It probably seemed so very *simple* to them! :S

My point there is that a generalist journalist is inherently biased because of a lack of information. They base what they write on what they know about a subject or situation, for better or for worse.

And of course, specialist journalists are just as inherently biased because they have inevitably reached their own conclusions about certain aspects of their specialization and even if they try their hardest to keep out those biases, they will be there to some degree.

But the real question here was a pragmatic one, and I'll be honest: I don't pay nearly as much attention to what's going on in the world as I ought to, or in the ways I ought to. I get my news from tivo-ing Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and otherwise watching FOX news when I'm bored. I watch The Daily Show and the CR because whatever they are reporting on would probably just make me cry if not for the bit of humour they toss in. And FOX...well, I watch it because I seem to be addicted to being flabberghasted.

I'm with VideCorSpoon's thoughts, though: Go with more specialized sources.

I know that I definitely do not trust the AP wire. Too many instances where the journalists are allowed to not cite their source in stories involving highly mundane things ("Timmy fell off his bike again today," a source close to Timmy said. WHAT?! WHO? It's likely either lazy journalism or unethical journalism and neither is acceptable to me. I don't trust AP for other reasons as well, but that's the one made me really start taking a hard look at them.

I do, however, tend to respect things from Knight Ridder, another wire source for news.

Oh! And I would also add this bit of advice: Always always always look at the source of what you're reading - there is a high chance that if you're reading a blog or listening to a podcast or reading most newspapers, online or offline, that most of the story (or all of it) is from a wire of some kind. If your goal is to get the "big picture" then making sure you're not just reading the same quotes tossed together differently is important

The Cristian Science Monitor is an awesome source for news. If I could only receive news from one source it would be this paper or website. The name is misleading, but do not read into its meaning. It was started in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist and thus its name. Notice the paper was started by a women before she had the right to vote. I would say it is by far the least bias paper printed today, and often looks at stories from sophisticated viewpoints.

Another good site for world news is Aljazeera.net. They are more sympathetic to non western interests so they tend to be more fair when considering the condition of the world. They have both print and video content so they provide a full spectrum of content.

For nonmainstream news coverage check out Alternet.org as it covers things the mainstream media typically doesn't thus its liberal slant. While hosting its own content the site also offers stories from other liberal publications like The Nation, Mother Jones, and TomDispatch.com.

I perceive that Newsweek is the optimal news website which has hitherto their vocabulary and fluent language laudable,we could also draw an anology of BBC.