> Are alternative news sites better?

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.