At the highest tier of garbage, you have cable news channels. They exist to keep you irritated and anxious because otherwise there would be nothing for them to talk to you about all day every day.

Video news in general is worse than talk / text because they can hijack your visual senses to get you worked up.

I used to listen to a lot of NPR. I always told myself they were fair and balanced and couldn't use visuals to deceive me. Over the summer, I realized that they are little better than the liberal version of conservative talk radio. Which is a shame, because I put a lot of faith in them for about a decade.

Local news papers are probably decent at a lot of things, but having known people who interact with reporters for them, local papers tend to be just as biased as anything else. They are, after all, just run by people.

I get most of my "national" news these days through either here on HN or a couple twitter feeds that seem to curate what they retweet pretty well. Local news, my friends and neighbors are plugged in to the community and we experience news in real time.

Honestly, I think for most things, you will get a better understanding of the landscape if you aren't hearing it from people who have a monetary interest in you wanting to come back for more "news" tomorrow.

And on that note, I have cut down on my twitter quite a bit as well lately.