To be clear, I'm not saying that mainstream news sources like this are immune to errors, or bias. I KNOW they aren't. Not only because I can cite some specific instances of both, but due to the fact that... they are, after all, composed of humans. Which tells you right there that the capacity for these things is built-in.

What I am saying is that they're useful; they provide things that non-mainstream, overtly-of-a-political-persuasion sources cannot. For one thing, they do original reporting; the others typically piggyback on that. Productively, in many cases (their op-eds/analysis can be a valuable contribution)... but they still need someone to dig up the material in the first place. Also, while the mainstream certainly CAN be biased, the others flat-out ARE-- inescapably so; it's their fucking mission statement, fer chrissakes. That just goes with the territory. It's not so much "bad" or "good" as an inherent limitation.

So basically, for news, I take the survey approach-- looking across a range of outlets. Who's reporting this? Everybody? Or only the self-declared partisans? It's kind of a parts-of-the-elephant situation. The partisans concentrate on a certain part (say, the trunk); the mainstream are generalists. You put 'em together to get a sense of the whole animal. Usually obsessing on the trunk is too limiting, especially given their propensity to treat EVERYTHING as the trunk (like there is nothing else)... but sometimes? It picks up what the generalists miss.