1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1.
2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources.
3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened.
4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.
This is helpful, and something I agree with mostly. Of course the difficulty is what you nodded towards in point 4: "Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down". We lead busy lives and need to digest news quickly. It helps when you have a few voices from different domains that you trust, where you can let your guard (relatively) down.
The other thing that is helpful is your reminder to cross reference sources with no vested interest. The conspiracy-mongering journalist has a vested interest in his/her narrative looking convincing and will have a link to his merch site at the bottom of the article/vodcast/podcast.
1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1.
2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources.
3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened.
4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.