You cannot get your news from one source. The best investors I know are the ones who find the balance between the true believers on either side. I have heard it put this way, and I do not know who said it first: the faithful believe in something, the cynics believe in nothing, and the skeptics find the balance. That is close to a job description for an investor.
Start with how the business actually works. News is entertainment, and entertainment is how these outlets get revenue to the bottom line, because they sell advertising against it. Why? Very simple. Attention is the product. When a voice with a particular point of view appears on a network, whether that view is right or left, pro-business or anti-business, environmental or industrial, that person was asked to speak because a producer wanted them talking to the audience that outlet measures.
So you cannot watch one network and say this is the truth, and you cannot watch the other and say this is the truth. Both are bending the story toward their own listener, because that is how they get paid. That is not a conspiracy. It is a revenue model, and it is working exactly as designed.
The delivery has changed too. My kids do not watch the news. They get it on their phones, from Instagram and TikTok and everywhere else, which means the sorting is being done for them by something optimized for the same thing. The response is the same as it has always been. Read more than one source, stay a skeptic, and do the thinking yourself. Finding the truth in something is work, and it is the part of the job that nobody can do for you.
