Ok, you can certainly say that “Trust, but verify” means “Don’t trust, just verify”. The trust part is still superfluous in the initial statement.
Or, you could say that “Trust but verify” was just a tactfully diplomatic formula. Which was certainly how Reagan must have meant it, given the context in which he said it.
Why is this something to brag about?
Everything I know, including all the news I get, I get from The Straight Dope!
For years, I used to say:
It’s best to get your news the way you should be getting your nutrition: from as wide a variety of sources as possible and from as close to the source (ie, with as little processing (spin)) as possible.
But it took an inordinate amount of time.
Then, I just switched to the wide variety of sources but without trying to validate against available source documents.
Which saved a ton of time, but cost me a whole lot of faith in what I was learning.
Now, I think about it like a woodworker I heard interviewed. He was asked about glue – kind of a big part of woodworking. He responded:
I have a lot of very strong opinions but I don’t cling to any of them very tightly.
I’ve loosened my grip on the idea that I can even reasonably readily have a very good idea of what’s going on in this world, so I’ll stick with my strong opinions, but I’ll try not to cling to any of them too tightly 
I’m a print consumer and I can generally tell when an article is researched and well sourced by how it conveys its information.
I’m certainly susceptible to being overly influenced due to this confidence.
I am not fooled by right wing “news” pieces that are basically third party written op-eds.
Is this something to brag about?
TV provides more than news. Saying “I have never owned a TV” sounds much like “I’ve never been to the movies” or “I’ve never been to a play” or “I’ve never read a book”. Fine as a personal preference. but something to brag about?
I would have guessed they were being self-deprecating. People have bragged about not watching/owning TV since the 50s and most people roll their eyes at such. It is a pretty common trope actually.
I am a bit of a news junkie but in written form mostly. I use the News app on my I phone and upgraded to the subscriber edition. It compiles articles from many sources all over the globe. WSJ opinion pieces often get a thumbs down from me. I have the Reuters and NYT app and listen to several news/ talk programs on Sirius xm. Mostly POTUS, and Urban View (joe madison fan here).
Also the BBC news and Bloomberg. PRX for general interest. Sometimes FOX to counter my liberal leanings. Oddly I used to be a solid NPR listener but though it’s on my dial I rarely listen. 
Reuters saved my sanity during the election.
I read the Daily Mail UK and NY Daily News and Post for sensationalized bits and celebrity gossip.
I canceled cable tv a few years ago so no I don’t watch network news. I have two large screen tvs collecting dust these days unless I hook my laptop up to them to watch Netflix on the big screen.
Not the only one. (Raises hand). Although these days I avoid mentioning it, or add a disclaimer like “I watch series on Netflix!” I have been missing out on cultural trends, celebrities, and memes since 1972.
@DorkVader, I know you said you don’t have time to research every little thing stated as true by any news source. I get that. It’s a common problem. But I do believe the only way you can come to an understanding about which news sources are trying hard to report fairly and accurately is by doing some of this, at least periodically.
I’m fortunate. I have the time to go directly to sources. I read the reports, the indictments, etc., watch the speeches live and in total. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the news sources that report most accurately what adheres to reality and feel comfortable I can usually rely on their takes.
Reuters, the AP, McClatchy, BBC, NPR, CSPAN and – most surprising to me – MSNBC. Most of the NBC affiliates are generally decent.
I steer clear of Fox anything and even CNN. I haven’t watched CNN in a long time, so it may be different now. But they used to tend to do what Fox used to do: Lie by omission and not presenting a complete picture of the event/speech/written report. And Fox, as we know, will flat-out lie.
That said, I read widely and do consider reliable conservative sources such as The Atlantic, The Bulwark, The Hill and a few others.
Again, nothing substitutes for going to the original source as much as possible. But if you can’t do that regularly, at least do it sometimes. It will guide you well in choosing news sources.
My strategy is to look at a fairly wide spectrum of news. I get news alerts from
NPR
WSJ
NYT
The Economist
The Washington Post
Reuters
Al Jazeera
I also look at AP news, although i find their interface annoying, with ads in awkward places. And i Google headlines that I’m curious about, and try to find a local-ish paper that covers the story.
My husband listens to NPR incessantly, so i hear a lot of their radio coverage. They are one of my favorite news sources. We also get the local daily newspaper.
I don’t like TV news. It tends towards the visually exciting, and the spectacular. If i want to watch a political debate or something, my preference used to be NBC, but my TV no longer gets that, so I’ve mostly switched to NPR.
I mostly trust NPR and the WSJ. I don’t like the wall street journal’s politics, but I’ve twice read an article they published about something complicated that i happened to know a lot about, and both times they were surprisingly accurate. In contrast, I’ve read an awful lot of really bad science articles in otherwise decent news sources. The reporters weren’t trying to mislead, they just didn’t understand the topic, and so made major mistakes.
I think both Fox and CNN lie, and avoid them.
Forgot to mention The Guardian, should really subscribe donate. Next!!
I do try to look into stories here and there as time and energy allows, especially if it’s something that interests me or relates to me in some way.
The thing that solidifies the reliability of PBS for me is (maybe not the best thing but…) my Gpa preferred Newshour over all others, he never maligned their news as being liberally slanted as so commonly happens, and he was pretty conservative. Just not dumb. Gpa was a pretty big influence on my life.
Everyone keeps mentioning BBC, I’d forgotten them and also Nippon News of all programs, for some reason news primarily relating or from an Japanese perspective fascinates me. I don’t know how reliable it is though. Those two though are on from basically midnight to about 2 am, I think, I’m usually in bed asleep or nearly so at that time, so I don’t get to watch as much as I’d like.
Hummm, CNN, I haven’t watched more than a few minutes long video clip from them in a long time, so I could be missing the boat on something with them. I’ll look into it more when I can.
ETA I do try to do some basic research into the news sources I use as to reliability of the news sources most easily accessable to me.
I follow a variety of sources, globally, and double-check them where I can.
A large issue with many sources isn’t that they’re dishonest it may also be that the people who work there just aren’t all that smart.
During the Trump presidency, for example, there was both reporting that Kellyanne Conway was in constant contact with CNN (so this isn’t just speculation) but, from reading their articles, you could tell that certain news items could have only come from someone in the oval office, if you just stopped to think about it. A lot of news about how cruel Trump was to Mexico, Russia, China, Arab countries, etc. - things that would anger economists and bleeding hearts - showed intimiate knowledge of the conversations in the Oval Office and could only have practically come to the media direct from Trump’s chosen people. When you see that sort of news, you have to ask if you’re seeing a “leak” or is the goal to generate headlines that continue to demonstrate that the President is brash, daring, and actively fighting against elites and hippies?
Similarly, when Cy Vance was investigating the Trump organization, we had various reports saying that Trump’s CFO, Weisselberg, was planning to turn himself in. Again, who would know Weisselberg’s intention other than Wiesselberg himself and others in the Trump organization? Here, we can be absolutely certain that it’s Trump’s people talking so we have to assume that they’re getting the information about the investigation out into the media to try and help promote the “politically motivated targeting” angle and fund off supporters.
Having a sense for what the media is doing and how they’re going about it requires active attention and reverse engineering. If the result of that is that the certain sources are acting as the unwitting mouth organ of bad folk, that’s still not really a hallmark of a good source. If they can be easily played, they’re still not very trustworthy - regardless of their journalistic integrity.
So you not only need to double-check the factuality of your sources but also mentally recreate and critique the methods that you can gleam from the reporting to figure out if these are smart people. If they’re not smart then they’re not going to look in the right places and double-check the right things, themselves. They might be telling the truth as they know it, but an honest idiot is still an idiot and not the guy that you want as your source for knowledge of the world.
In general, from my double-checks and personal experience, I would say that Ad Fontes and MediaBiasFactCheck are both good enough (at this moment in time) for you to just shortcut all of the hassle. If it’s a minimally-leaning source with High or better factuality then it’s a good source. If not then you’re better to just skip it.
If you want to go past that, I would recommend looking at the Press Freedom Index to find countries with Satisfactory or better freedom and try to get a variety of sources from around the world, targeting boring business folks (and double-checking against MediaBiasFactCheck if listed).
Here are my sources, registered in Feedly:
- Western:
** Financial Times
** Washington Post
** Wall Street Journal
** Jerusalem Post (Warning: Mostly Factual)
** Jewish Telegraphic Agency
** Haaretz
** Baltic Times
** Swiss Info - Eastern:
** The Korea Herald (Warning: Mostly Factual)
** BOOM Fact Check (india)
** The Wire (India) (Warning: Mostly Factual)
** Nikkei Asia - Specialty:
** Volokh Conspiracy
** RAND Blog
** Lawfare
** bellingcat
** TechCrunch
** Ars Technica
** Defense One
** Government Executive
I haven’t yet found satisfactory sources in South America or Africa.
I don’t really trust any of them. I remember learning in grade school how to differentiate between a stated fact vs. an opinion, and for the most part I filter out opinions to glean the black and white facts. This leaves me with questions a lot of the time, but I’d prefer to have the correct general idea about something than a very clear and very incorrect opinion.
I also make a hard distinction between fact and opinion. I generally trust all major news sources when they report a direct fact from the newsroom, unless said fact strikes me as unlikely to be true.
Another distinction: If they report X as saying Y, I’ll generally take that as a fact. But this has no bearing on whether I think Y is true.
~Max