Discounting the questionable journalistic ethics of the 24-hr news cycle media, I am hard pressed to consider the other major news outlets to be as equally questionable.
CBS screwed up recently with the embassy bombing recently. That in of itself is bad. But the fact they admitted fault I think speaks volumes for their efforts.
Mostly, IME, alternative news outlets are as focussed on easy narratives as major news outlets, though they often have different preferred narratives. They also, IME, tend to be more overtly partisan in their narrative preferences than most major outlets. (Fox is somewhat of an outlier among major news networks in the consistency of the partisan slant of its presentations.)
If you are passively accepting any news outlets (or any narrow set of news outlets) presentation, your getting spoonfed someone else's preferred narratives. To get beyond that, you have to actively engage by seeking out multiple sources with different biases and, where possible, reaching past them directly to the original sources of information, and critically engaging with the information.
But that's work, and even most of the people with the skills to do it aren't going to bother wtih that for most issues.
Except, largely, they didn't/won't. Democrats listened to what their preferred news outlets were saying about George W. Bush-as-President for 8 years, and Republicans will no doubt listen to what their preferred news outlets say about Barack Obama-as-President for a similar length of time, but that's very different from actually listening to opposing viewpoints.
But for the most part they aren't even passively listening to the other side, much less actively listening to the other side and engaging with the positions presented.
> But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.
Major media "news" sources are almost completely dominated by opinion/commentary, so that's not why they leave off synthesis. They leave off synthesis because the narrative they are generally trying to sell is about the conflict not the underlying reality, and when they are trying to sell a narrative about the underlying reality it is the black and white story that one side is good and right and the other side is bad and wrong, not some fuzzy gray synthesis.