There's a short list of things the news media get right, and a few anti-patterns they use which imo intentionally confuse. The major media outlets are pretty g

There's a short list of things the news media get right, and a few anti-patterns they use which imo intentionally confuse. The major media outlets are pretty good at providing transcripts or video of events. They are terrible at summarizing. If there's a news headline that someone said/did something that seems outlandish, 9/10 they didn't say/do that, or what they said makes perfect sense in context (Recent example: A major politician is not going to publicly support infanticide). Always read/watch the source material, preferably from multiple sources because the media will tend to edit out context (recent example: Covington kids). If I can't be bothered to read/watch the source material, then the alleged story wasn't important enough for me to be upset. I can behave as if I'd never even heard of such a thing. Never believe unattributed/anonymous statements. You should assume any quote that does not have a real person's name attributed to it is a lie. Sometimes it will be true, but not often enough to matter. If it is true, and it's a concern of actual importance, real evidence will surface eventually. Wait for this to actually happen. Always assume statements made by officials in the lying industry is a lie. That's NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc. The media tends to report, "X official said Y" in such a way that we're supposed to assume Y is a fact now. But the media is almost never critical of these statements and there is often on supporting evidence provided. If it's not important enough to potentially reveal secret techniques by showing me the evidence, it's not a big enough deal for me to care what you said about it. I'm not anti-CIA/NSA/etc. but I understand their role is sometimes to lie to me in order to further some greater agenda like promoting a war effort. Unless there's a world changing event going on right now, like 9/11 scale world changing event, avoid 24 hour and even daily news. These outlets are drug dealers, selling you an outrage high. Weekly news sources are much better. If a story isn't important enough to make it into the weekly news, it probably wasn't worth spending time on in the first place. Also, being a weekly publication means more of the story has unfolded, and the corrections are more likely to already be baked in. In the 24 hour news cycle, the outrage hot-take gets spread around, and then nobody ever sees the correction/retraction.