Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.
I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats.
If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does.
I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.
Similarly, working on campaigns reveals that most political commentary isn't even wrong, so not even worth debating.
PS-
> about how the US puts cars first
And the flip side: How anything less than full throated praise for and life long devotion to cars, such as asking for safety improvements like sidewalks and bike paths, is part of a grand anti car conspiracy. Sure. There's 1.4b cars in the world, and growing. And me peddling to work 3 days a week is an existential threat to the world order.
News generally doesn't "educate" (eg add knowledge to your views that then updates them), it confirms biases.
* NY Times: Attacked from all sides by those in power, and for a good reason.
* Washington Post: Smaller, and if I had to say, maybe not quite up to the NY Times
* Financial Times: Expensive, but on par IMHO with the other two.
* The Guardian can be excellent, but signal-to-noise (consequential-to-not) ratio isn't as strong as the others, IMHO.
* The Economist: Free-market ideologues, but if you have to read one thing, they are most efficient. Not really journalism (they don't go out and dig up information, nor report their factual basis transparently with quotes, etc.; but short, efficient, sophisticated, very wide-ranging analysital pieces.
* Poltico: I'm not sure what I think of them; I don't trust their ownership entirely [0], but they are seriously competing with the others, at least in national/international political news.
The Wall Street Journal seems serious, but it's run by Rupert Murdoch. If people trusted the WSJ before, I don't know how they do now after the Dominion case revealed Murdoch openly manipulating reporting to favor Trump and others.
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Another good options is curated news summaries. I'd look up Just Security's, for example. Politico also has some newsletters like NatSec Daily. Memeorandum can be great, if you skip over the less important stories.
[0] Look up the NY Times reporting on Axel Springer's owner (Axel Springer bought Politico recently).
It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage.
We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.