Thank you for the courteous response to a comment that could easily have been taken as an insult! I don't think it's about individually high-quality sources as

Thank you for the courteous response to a comment that could easily have been taken as an insult! I don't think it's about individually high-quality sources as much as it is about how you take in information. Don't consider yourself to understand an issue until you've heard a compelling argument on both sides, or have thoroughly convinced yourself that you've adequately searched through diverse enough fora. Don't read anything, from Alex Jones's Facebook page to the frontpage of the NYT, without spot-checking sources, reading studies, etc. There's no filter that ensures that journalists are the best humanity has to offer: just like all humans, plenty of them are incompetent or dishonest, and beyond that groupthink exists in cultures that get as insular and self-aggrandizing as journalism's. Correctly combine a variety of low-quality signals and you can get a really high-quality signal. That being said, some general recommendations for individual sources are (in ascending order of obscurity) The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Marginal Revolution (economist Tyler Cowen's blog). I find they do a better job than most of: 1) representing different opinions intellectually honestly 2) being thorough in their reasoning and analysis and/or 3) being fairly high-quality