I think Al Jazeera is about as honest as news media can get. Maybe NPR also in the U.S.

I guess my generation killed the newspaper. I've never had a newspaper subscription to begin with. I went from reading my parents newspapers to getting my news online. Next to tv and documentaries which used to be better. Or maybe my vision is skewed. I grew up in the Netherlands with NOS journaal and NOVA. After moving to Canada I didn't find anything of similar quality. It might be gone in the Netherlands too. (NOVA documentaries are no longer made) I watched NOVA online for a while, as well as reading NRC online for world news until I got kids that is. Online news was never as satisfying as sitting down with a real newspaper on a long flight though. At home I simply have better things to do.

Your world shrinks when you get kids. I guess I will get interested in world affairs again when they grow up a bit.

Online news isn't all bad though. It's very easy to get different sides of the story. The 'truth' however, who knows. It was certainly interesting to see the difference on a daily basis between Dutch reporting of world events and Canadian + American reporting on the same events.

Yes, they are nearly all biased and cover things up. Shame journalists don't do more to scrutinise governments and the establishment. I like Al Jazeera though, a truly global media for a global world. Such interesting stuff in their magazine on ipad 

Hey, that's a very interesting topic that I've been thinking about myself a lot in recent weeks.

Over here in Germany, there is currently something very unusual going on:

Most popular news media over here have a "readers comments" section below the articles on their webpages. Since the Ukraine crisis, there are extremely many comments complaining about the bad quality of the reports on the Ukraine crisis in german media. Many think that the media do a very bad job, that the articles are extremely biased, anti-russian propaganda, that the german media tend to completely ignore certain topics that do not fit within a certain agenda.

And now there's a certrain trend that people use the comments section to inform other readers about "the other half of the truth". They post links to foreign media articles, point out background information about certain journalists, institutions etc. Many people state that they currently feel much better informed by the comments sections than by the actual articles.

It's a very interesting phenomenon, I've never seen anything even remotely similar in 35 years. During the first few weeks, most media simply ignored these reader reactions. But it became too big to ignore, and meanwhile dozens of articles have already appeared discussing the phenomenon. It is said that behind the scenes some people are very alarmed by this trend, as they consider it a serious threat to the "Deutungshoheit" (I wonder if there is a proper translation for this word?) of certain leading media.

Then again, people who thought that our national media are trustworthy were always naive. Germany's by far most influential and popular newspaper (BILD) for example is pretty open about being biased. They've published their code of conduct online, and one might expect a newspapers code of conduct to include things "fair, unbiased reporting", "being objective" or whatever. But you won't find a single word about such principles there - instead, the 5 rules they have exclusively address targets like "unconditional support for Israel" "strengthening the transatlantic relationship" etc. They don't even claim to be unbiased, and there are reports about journalists who start working for the newspaper need to sign a letter that they can be fired for writing articles that criticize the US.

I guess in earlier times people were already unsatisfied by media reports, but since people couldn't comment on articles written on paper and reading several foreign media was expenseive, it was never as obvious to the public.

Really?  That's about every US internet article ever... since like the interent existed... often on the most benign articles.

Perhaps this is another example where the US is ahead of the rest of the world.  My take on the situation in the UK fits well with ArnoldRimmer's description of what is happening in Germany.  While there has always been dissent if you knew where to look it has rarely felt so 'mainstream' as it does right now regarding the Ukranian situation.  Where in the past it felt like there were a handful of correspondents trying to tell people about the other side of the story to a largely ignorant public today it feels like a significant minority (and in some cases majority) are rejecting the message coming from politicians and media alike.

Exactly what so-called propaganda and such are we talking about here...? The OP's pretty vague. The way it's written makes it seem like it's about a particular subject or some specific recent news, but then fails to mention what that actually is.

I rarely consume news in the traditional sense. I follow some groups on Facebook and Google Plus, and they sift through the shit for me.

On the whole, though, I don't really see much the point in the news. Even if it wasn't propaganda, news is just mostly pointless information. Can be interesting, I suppose, but I don't think a person is "superior" for being "well-informed". Good for pub quizzes. Not much good for much else. Much better spending that time improving a skill or learning something of some kind of economic or personal value.

Well UK I can understand to some degree, what with the UK having so much government hold on the media with BBC being the big one.

I guess the main difference with the US is size?

There are so many Newspapers and Newscasts out there, i suppose it makes more sense that opinions are more fractionalized/regionalized and because of that, commenters will bleed over into other newspapers.

Rarely do both Red and Blue mainstream papers cover an issue on the same side, and even when they do you've got libretarian papers, communist papers, isolationist papers, economist news papers and if they all agree somehow, you've got the conspiracy theory rags.

Germany I'd of thought would of been like the US.