A few years ago I realized that I wasn't up to date with what's happening in the world. For this reason I decided to read the news more regularly.
This choice brought up a few questions for me, such as where to find reliable sources (newspapers, podcasts, blogs, magazines, etc.) and how to find unbiased news.
This last question was especially intriguing: how can you find unbiased news?
I decided to read as many news sources as I could, with the intention of checking back after a couple of months to see what insights I had gained.
Exploration
After a few months of reading I realized that I was able to find as many unbiased sources as perfect circles in the real world: zero. Some podcasters and journalists do a great job at reducing bias in the information they provide, but nobody ever gave me the impression to be perfectly unbiased.
If there existed perfection there wouldn't be any news on this planet after all.
However, from all this reading I got some valuable principles that are now helping me to understand the world. The rest of this article presents these principles.
Look for biased sources
Journalism revolves around the basic difference between fatc and opinion. Journalists report facts and sometimes also give their opinion about these facts. Of each fact/event there is only one correct version but there can be many explanations, many opinions.
Reading news in search of facts is usually not a problem: it can be as simple as reading the headlines of a couple newspapers, possibly from different political views. It is searching for good explanations that is more challenging.
What I found is that it is worth looking precisely for biased sources and then comparing them with each other. This sounds paradoxical but it works. After having spent quite some time reading the BBC, The Economist, Axios, CNN, and La Repubblica, I started to read the English edition of newspapers like TASS from Russia and Global Times from China. You might be right saying that TASS and Global Times are more censored than Western outlets like the BBC, but that's irrelevant in this context: they still give you an opinion. It's basically the opinion of the ruling party of their country.
Once you identify your biased sources (for me now it's mostly TASS, SCMP, Global Times, BBC, Axios, Al Jazeera and The Economist; I personally see every source as biased) you can simply compare their opinion about the same fact. This is not just a fun exercise that will open your mind, but also a simple and easy way to understand what is fact and what is opinion. And this brings me to the next point.
Labelling facts and opinions
If you still value finding news with as little bias as possible, then I suggest you look for sources that put some effort in clearly labelling what is opinion and what is data. I personally found that The Economist puts some effort into clearly labelling what is opinion, as well as even reporting alternative opinions without painting them in too bad a colour. They have their opinion and they make their mistakes, but among the sources that I tried they were the best.
Until now I've mostly been reading (and listening to) free media, and The Economist was the only paid source that I read more than just a couple times.
This brings me to say that paid sources can be of higher quality, and this also connects with another realization that changed the way I read the news.
Top-down vs. bottom-up censorship
Many Westerners find Chinese and Russian media to be more censored than the average Western newspaper. For this reason they end up reading Western media only.
Western media has less control coming from the top than news outlets in China or Russia. But at the same time all media, especially in the West, are somewhat at risk of a different form of censorship, a sort of "bottom-up" censorship.
As an example, take the war in Ukraine of 2022-2023: American outlets published a lot about it at the beginning, and then much less once the audience got "tired" of it.
While with top-down censorship it's the ruling party that is in control of the media, with bottom-up censorship it's the audience that is somewhat involuntarily censoring the media.
Censorship, in the end, is just repression of an opinion.
This thought about top-down vs. bottom-up censorship is quite far-fetched, and I only put it here because I think it could be relevant in the future. But still, it helps read the news so I thought I'd write it down here.
Wrapping up
In conclusion, I approach all news as imperfect mirrors of the world. For each media outlet I try to understand what are its biases and with what kind of pressure/censorship it has to deal.
I also try to read as many different sources as possible, no matter how biased/censored they might be.