I was absolutely shocked by the abysmal coverage by Reuters of the Fukushima disaster. Many "quotes" from Tepco and the Japanese government were blatantly mistranslated to the point where Reuter's version was the opposite of what was said. I used to keep links to some of those stories, but I seem to have misplaced them. If you dig back into the archives of the wikipedia page you can still find them. One of the most notable incidents was when Tepco was first considering whether or not there had been a meltdown, Reuters reported that Tepco had said that there was no meltdown. What they actually said (in Japanese) was, "There is a possibility that there is a meltdown. We have to wait because the data is consistent with there not being a meltdown as well."

I'll have to apologize for not digging up good references because I don't have time. Several years ago there was a scandal in the Japanese press where one of the news outlets admitted to printing fictitous stories with an anti-nuclear agenda. This was before Fukushima (and I'm struggling to remember which news outlet it was, so I won't try to guess). I suspect that what is happening is that Reuters (and probably other news aggregators) are quite happy to take stories from established reporters on the ground. I think they do not rigorously check the facts, though. I have occasionally noticed other similar mistranslations, for example when the Japanese finance minister speaks at G8 summits, etc. Surprisingly often the report that gets picked up in the English news services is virtually the opposite of what is actually said.

My rule of thumb: If it is a contentious issue and it is happening in a country where English is not the main language, the odds that you will get an unbiased report in English media is virtually 0. The closer to home you get, the more likely you are to get good reports, but even then if you actually check the sources yourself you can find glaring errors in a shockingly large percentage of the stories.

People are people. People are busy. People don't check other people's work. Entertaining fiction sells better than complicated fact. It's really never going to work out. As long as you know that, it's fine.

Reuters is not US. AP is pretty good for big news, yea.

AP has its biases, in particular they are seen as anti-Israel with the whole saga of changing a headline from "Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem." to finally "Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station." being one of the better know headlines. The original headline remained on many sites.

Yea, some qualifiers about big news.

Also, there's roughly 0 unbiased coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict at this point. You kinda have to just read multiple sides from different news outlets and try to sift through the bias yourself.

E.g. most recently, it's hard to tell from a headline about an IDF executing an unarmed guy lying on the ground with a headshot whether or not it's a fair interpretation of the situation.