The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.

The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.

• Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
• Propaganda model
• Edward Bernays
• Walter Lippmann
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Powell Memorandum
• The Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy

* I’ve criticized MBFC & Ad Fontes before:

• https://lemmy.ml/post/12705767/8913172
• https://lemmy.ml/post/13566156/9605612

I'd recommend starting out by reading a very biased but well researched and factually correct book, which will give you invaluable information about how it all became the way it is today, which will make it possible for you to discern who lies about what and why today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States

Stop worrying about bias and start caring about reality. Judge every claim on the merit of the evidence presented for it. That's all there is to it, really.

Politics is always biased. That's the point of it. There is no strictly objective reporting that has any meaning.

https://www.allsides.com/

Last Week Tonight

If you want to do it the hard way it's time to watch CSPAN, CSPAN2, and CSPAN3. It's the only way to see what Congress is doing straight from the horse's mouth.

Wikipedia. It tends to have excellent, neutral explanations of ongoing political stories.

As a plus, every article is written to be a complete picture (at low resolution) and so you don’t have to deal with the way regular news articles lack orienting stuff if they’re an “update on the situation” article.

Like if you haven’t been following something, wikipedia articles are written in a way that brings you up to speed from zero.

Whatever you do, think about what you read from the perspective of bettering the lives of people. If the policy or the people are saying things that come off as hateful or prejudiced, maybe that's what they're trying to accomplish.

I just finished listening to this. It feels like he embraces the bias, but shows that's is only as biased as the history we learn in school.