Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there.
I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they cover that's even the slightest culture war adjacent with a fistful of salt.
Political alignment is a valid criterion to curate your news feed. However, if you apply that as your only criterion, you end up back at square on: getting a colored sliver of the news.
There are many more criteria you could apply as well. Is it a non-profit or a for profit outlet? Is the outlet based in the U.S. or is it located abroad, say, the E.U. or Asia? Is it a local, regional or national outlet? Is it an outlet I consider as my primary, daily go-to, or is it an outlet I consider as a weekend read? Is it an outlet focussing on a particular demographic? Which one? Am I part of that demographic? Does the outlet only provide short-form news articles, and/or long-reads with background information? Does the outlet report from a single side, or does it pit different perspectives against each other in equal measure?
Asking those questions to yourself adds differentiation in your how you curate your news intake.
The latter doesn't even have to be limited to other news outlets. Reading books is one of the best ways to gain the perspective one needs to digest the daily news.
I follow U.S. news sources but that doesn't mean I'm willing to accept what they publish at face value. Amending the news with many other sources helps me to gain perspective.
The trouble today is how much attention is diverted towards consuming fast digital media and being active in a 24/7 economy. If you don't take the time to stop, slow down and think about what the news is reporting, you're not going to develop the skills and the knowledge to properly digest the news and form nuanced opinions.
NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet.
The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom issues that don’t get airtime in other outlets, it’s not just “all left all the time”. Maybe give it a listen sometime and see what a true counterpart on the other side would sound like - it’s always enlightening to hear what other people hear. And bear in mind - that's what it sounds like for me to listen to Fox, too.
That’s a big part of the problem with the right-wing media bubble at the moment, you think the counterpart to Fox News is NYT but that’s a false equivalency. NYT is ultimately a middle of the road outlet, you’re just so far out of the mainstream that it looks left. I frequently consider NYT articles to be taking too much of a pro-right or pro-corporate stance on an issue (especially Maggie Haberman, she’s just awful).
At the end of the day the US has two right wing parties - one center-right and one far-right, and that's how our news media is structured too. We have two pro-corporate parties, and that's how our news media is structured too. MSNBC is owned by General Electric, with major interests in defense contracting. Washington Post is owned by Bezos. Fox is essentially a media arm of the Republican party. CNN are just sort of chaos monkeys chasing share prices. There is very little "independent media" in the US.
And no, I don’t take Democracy Now too seriously either.
Ok then.
If you don't think the US is a right-wing country, you do need recalibration lol. And that's really both parties for the most part - the voice for, say, medicare for all, or for abolishing penal slavery, are basically nonexistent and non-mainstream.
In international terms, the US effectively has a far-right party and a centrist party, with a handful of leftists lumped into the centrist party where they're effectively sidelined in terms of policy.
The same system that centrally plans and limits care provider production. You don't have market health care or socialised heath care. You have a solution that somehow combines the worst of both.
Then you look at the global dosage of other countries. Its the US socially right of China? Japan? Any part of Asia? If your calibration is literally the left half of the spectrum I guess you'd see the US as the farthest right of the world.
There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial.
For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there.
> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?
Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble.
Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE.
I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance.
But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.