Are there not news verification products out there that I can use instead? I'm not a journalist. I don't have the education to find very specific claims sources that aren't other news articles. eg. Where am I supposed to go hunting for an exact quote stated by a politician on video except from another news cast recording the event?
How would a "news verification" service work? It would just be journalists verifying the work of other journalists. There are fact checking platforms, but, again, it's journalists all the way down, at least until you hit primary sources like scientific papers, at which point you have a slightly different verification problem.
At a certain point, you have to accept that your information about current events is going to come from journalists, which is why it's necessary to cross-check it and understand how you might be mislead.
- take the facts the all sources with competing perspectives agree on as likely to be the truth
- for facts that appear highly relevant but only appear articles with one perspective, but omitted in articles with an opposing perspective, seek out primary evidence to corroborate the evidence. Every time they turn out to be true, give trust points to the ones that included it and subtract trust points from the ones that omitted it. If they turn out to be false or distorted, do the opposite.
- discard everything that is obviously opinion, conjecture, etc.
- then rinse and repeat, building an internal model of trustworthiness for different sources and update those models as the trustworthiness of those different sources change over time.