People can be divided into two categories as follows:
a) those who get all their news from one source, versus
b) those who routinely check multiple news sources.
You can fairly well predict the political affiliation of the folks in
category (a), and you can even more-or-less predict what their news
source will be, but that's not what I want to talk about. It's too
easy.
I would like to share some observations that only partially fit the
usual pattern.
It turns out that in the continental United States, this winter (2011-2012)
was the fourth-warmest winter on record, since they started keeping records
118 years ago. Did you learn about that from news reports? It depends on
what news source(s) you look at. I did some googling for things like
warmest intitle:winter site:abcnews.com
restricted to the last month. Here are the results:
The ones at the top of the least might have been predictable, but several of
the ones at the bottom of the list surprise me.
You can quibble with my methodology, but for some purposes it doesn't much
matter because whatever faults there are apply equally to all the news outlets.
For example, independent of the meaning of the story, we get to ask whether
the observed distribution of appearances makes sense. The null hypothesis is
that the story appears randomly in the various news outlets, according to some
sort of unbiased IID Poisson process. This hypothesis is rejected by a wide
margin.
I am absolutely *not* suggesting that this list should be used to select a
"good" or "bad" news source. Just the opposite. I don't trust any of them.
If you searched on a different topic, you would get a wildly different
distribution. My point is that if you want to be the least bit scientific
about staying informed, you should check multiple sources. If you only have
time to look at one each day, choose a different one each day.
Then ... check the primary sources if at all possible. For example, if CERN
is in the news, go to the CERN site and see what they are actually saying. In
all probability it will be different from what the reporters claim CERN is
saying.