Dealing with biased information

An anonymous poster here pointed out (correctly!) that some news sources are highly biased and are still widely read or viewed. This works because we are all biased to some degree and are reassured when we hear others validate our views. So a news source that has the same bias as a large segment of the population can be very popular. The problem with this (for those of us who want accuracy rather than affirmation) is that there is nothing to correct us when our views are mistaken. So how can we deal with this?

First of all, an information source which puts out incorrect or misleading information without correcting its mistakes is clearly of no use, so should be ignored. Even if they are sometime correct, there is no way to know which times this is happening. Like the stopped clock, they may be correct twice a day, but without an accurate clock, how can we know when? It is the working clock which has value, not the broken one. An information source which puts out false information, is by definition broken.

While a perfectly unbiased source is the ideal, an accurate but biased source can still be useful. A clock which is always ten minutes slow is perfectly good as long as we know how far off it is and correct for it. Similarly, an information source which gives correct information, but only information which agrees with its biases can also be useful, especially when the bias is the opposite of our own. This gives us guaranteed access to information which can improve our own understanding, if only of why other people believe as they do.

Unfortunately, gathering our own information on most subjects is impossible. No single person can do all the traveling needed to actually get first-hand information, even in the US alone, never mind world-wide. So we are stuck with finding sources we can trust.

For accurate new reporting, Associated Press and Reuters (available at Yahoo’s News page) seem to be pretty good at putting out facts with minimal manipulation. USA Today, on the other hand, tends to openly put commentary into their stories which appears to have no purpose but to be manipulative. (Check out the opening sentence on what was supposed to be a news story about Tom Delay. This sounds to me like Mark Anthony’s “we have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” manipulation). I finally gave up reading USA Today: I never found any information here that I could believe without first checking someplace else. A classic “stopped clock”. CNN is somewhere in the middle for me. I rarely agree with their point of view, but I sometimes find something which gets me thinking in new ways.
Does anyone out there have any favorite news or analysis sources they have found to be trustworthy? A compendium, combined with defined areas of accuracy (no one can be an expert on more than one or two subjects) would be invaluable.