is fox news about as reliable as CNN?
( i am asking for educational purposes only, in that i want to be educated on things)
Do you really want news? News you can trust? Because it doesn't exist.
So here's how you get it:
http://arstechnica.com/ -- tech news; things that will actually matter for the future
http://www.popsci.com/ -- tech & science news; mix of lowest common denominator and actually good stuff
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ -- world news; western bias
http://www.aljazeera.com/ -- world news; non-western/unconventional biases
http://www.cnn.com/ -- world/us news; corporate bias
http://www.nbcnews.com/ -- world/us news; corporate bias, but with a usually slightly better science section
http://www.npr.org/ -- world/us news; us bias
And that's how you get it. NEVER trust a single source. NEVER get your information from a single source, and definitely NEVER form an opinion based on one source. You want the real story? Find it on several of the above, and then find it on several other sources with entirely different biases, and there lies the point closest to the truth. You need to find the commonalities and find the differences; only then can you get to the core truth of the story and strip away the bias-driven spin. And typically, that point lies quite far away from any reporting with bets in the game for that particular story.
And if you can't be bothered to do that, you must simply accept the fact that you're being spoonfed whatever steaming turdpile benefits the CEO to report on.
And further, I would go beyond that, and say the news itself is only the lesser of the information to be gleaned. By doing this much more rigorous news-gathering routine (those are just most of the ones I use on a daily basis), you see the larger issue: perspective. You see where everyone is coming from, and what their points are based on.