I get most of my news from HN, Yahoo, and from what others post. These outlets give me many different sources to choose from. I tend to look for multiple sources, usually from competing outlets with different biases. So maybe I'll see an article that originated from Fox and then look at one from Huffpost. Then I can find what points they agreed on, since those are likely true. Then I can see what info is conflicting, missing, or recieved more emphasis between the two.
At this point I might look up the subject that it talks about so that I can understand the information from a systems-thinking perspective. I might read scholarly articles/blogs/courses. I might look at studies to understand the data and see if the study is being misrepresented, like the gender page gap and BLS study (you may need different sources for these due to biases on polarising subjects like guns).
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/pro-science/
Also, from the same group: https://newsfactsnetwork.com/about/
Coupled with Google Translate, it's also easy to get a grip on the major topics in other countries.
They're the best news orgs in terms of both substance and level-headed delivery.
Just make sure to skip WSJ's op ed section. It's a dumpster fire, just like NYT's.
NPR is great too.
For more specific topics I subscribe to smaller media orgs.
These include:
1. A few local news outlets that provide daily/weekly newsletters. I pay most attention to this as it has the proportionally largest impact on my daily life.
2. A few newsletters on specific issues of interest to me: current affairs related to China, general finance industry stuff (Matt Levine's Money Stuff), SupChina, FP's weekly China Briefing.
As others have stated, while news does not need to be sensationalize, it will always have bias. I don't think it's worth fighting it. Just find people who have a track record of acting in good faith and listen to what they have to say.
For example I'll often watch the Ruptly Youtube channel but before you jump up and down screaming 'it's Russian propaganda' it is, but at the same time, all their videos are uncensored they will often take 4 hours footage of something news worthy with no pundits editing or screaming over top of it. As an example this silly story from Egypt about a robot waiter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyuGnCZOwMo notice a few things, you can hear in the background what people are saying, this is almost always drowned out by a pundit yapping on our news. You can hear the guy talking in his native language with no questionable translations. By questionable translations I mean in my country I remember a long time some Egyptian protest, and the propaganda that passes for state news in my commonwealth country had edited out the voices of the crowd claiming they were shouting something different than what they really were shouting when I looked up the same unedited footage on Ruptly. So yes, it is 'evil state propaganda' but at least you get unedited footage, can hear what people are truly saying.
Otherwise there are journals you can read that will often have extensive in depth papers on whatever the socio-political situation of that country is like Oxford's Foreign Policy Analysis. Here's an example, let's say some new war breaks out in Africa again. Let's say there is pressure in all our countries to deploy a peacekeeping force and there is no independent news analysis, we just have tables of pundits yelling talking points framed in local politics. How do you know if 'peacekeeping' even works? Well that's when some of these journals step in to give you some non sensationalist analysis https://academic.oup.com/fpa/article/16/3/251/5824326?search... which you would have to run through sci-hub to get access to unless you have unlimited access to these journals through university libraries or something.
So, tl;dr, what I usually do is my local news headlines are dominated by (event) which is always just framed in national political talking points so highly sensationalist and pushing talking points that benefit some political party. When you go looking for (event) in journals you will often find background and analysis nobody else has to help understand it, like say the political relationship between Germany and Russia and some kind of trade conflict breaks out between them. There is background for this in journals you can read yourself to see why everything is set up the way it is without being distorted by the talking heads pretending it isn't set up that way and their preferred candidate X can easily rearrange this agreement.
I have tried "slow news" sources, various state sources in Europe and commonwealth, commercial news, so-called 'independent' news like AP or Intercept all of it is inherently biased to frame every story in some kind of political talking points and stories that do not fit this bias are just not even reported, so you need to fill in the rest with the "enemies" news like say, a Chinese newspaper article or even Syrian or Iranian, or Venezuelan, or whatever 'enemy' news. Sometimes they have different perspectives you didn't even consider and then can directly research these things yourself if you really want. To avoid this being a F/T job, which sounds like it is, I just make an afternoon of going through some Oxford journal articles (and other universities of course, to avoid the one-sided cultural problem again) and without fail whenever (event) happens in my local news I remember an article I already read about this, dig it up and lo and behold I now understand (event) better than the screaming pundits.
Anybody who knows of a good university, foreign policy type analysis journal I'd be interested too, like a French or Russian one to counter all the British and American one's I read just to see things that are left out.
