I fully agree with what Fbit wrote in their reply, especially the bit about
being properly informed about *everything* being a fulltime job, and seldom
worth your time. But I hope you don't mind if I add my 2 cents.
Firstly, as a general rule-of-thumb, the further news is published from where
you live, the more it's contents are likely to be subject to propaganda (and
the less likely they are to be directly useful to you). A neighbourhood
newsletter produced by people in that neighbourhood will tend to be pretty
reliable, because they are writing about things they have direct knowledge
of. Traditional news conglomerates, whose audience is the population of a
whole country or everyone in the world in a language group (eg all English
speakers), are only as reliable as their sources. Also, they are a high
priority target for propagandists of all kinds.
Secondly, as FBit says, when deciding how seriously to take the contents of
an article, it's worth considering the motives of the writer and the
publisher. In Aotearoa (NZ) where I come from, many of the so-called
"community newspapers" are actually owned by the same company that owns and
operates many of the daily newspapers in the major cities (Fairfax). The
articles in these "local" newspapers are often slanted towards the interests
of the corporations that advertise in the major dailies, and I treat them
with much more scepticism than I would articles in a genuinely community-run
newspaper.
With print publications and broadcast media, finding out who actually owns
and operates them can require a bit of research. On the internet, finding the
publisher of an article is often as easy as stripping the URL back to the
domain name (eg stripping the URL of this page back to "trisquel.info"), and
sometimes removing any subdomains (eg stripping layers.openembedded.org back
to openembedded.org). Usually, an "about" page will give you some information
about the publisher, and looking them up on sites like SourceWatch.org and
PowerBase.info can reveal information they don't want you to know about their
ownership and funding. More online research aids can be found here:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/drillingfortruth/online-research-aids
Hope some of that is useful.
