Pat,
Oh, too many to mention in detail, but I'll mention a few ways to keep up on things. First, some media principles:
1. Almost all media is owned by transnational megacorporations. Whatever they say is filtered by the conservative nature of large organizations that want to avoid offending the masses so that they can sell more of their products. So when you are watching CBS News or reading the New York Times, you have to keep in mind their point of view. I read an intereview with the head of the News division of ABC, and he admitted that ABC could not run a story criticizing Disney, the transnational megacorp that owns ABC.
2. The media is overwhelmingly conservative. The big lie of conservatives is that there is a liberal media. This is not true. This is a claim of right-wing conservatives who don't like the moderate conservative point-of-view. To them, anything except right-wing views is 'liberal.' In fact, a true liberal persepective is almost never allowed on mainstream media. You ususally get two perspectives: the 'conservative' perspective and the 'liberal' perspective, but both sides are actually conservative, just differing in their degree. Republicans are more right-wing than Democrats, but both are conservative. True liberals are marginalized to the point of disappearing from public discourse.
So when you are watching or reading U.S. media, you are being told the offical party line, with occasional dissenting views that usually don't go very far or very deep or amount to all that much. An example of this: After 9/11, what did almost all media do very quickly? They pasted the American flag all over their screens. They reported the offical party line of the White House almost without exception. They ignored the possibility that bin Laden was not behind the attacks. They became an almost perfect outlet for political propaganda. The media isn't supposed to take sides, not even America's. It is supposed to sit outside petty political considerations and report facts. But remember point 1 above -- the media exists to make profits for a corporation, and corps know they will make more money by giving people what they want, and thus can then sell more soap. Right now, it pays to wave the flag, and so wave the flag the media does.
When Russian news media did that during the Cold War, we called it government propaganda. So what do we call it now when the U.S. media does it?
As for alternate sources, what I do is try to get both sides. If a story involves Britain, read the story in a British newspaper online too. If it involves the Arabic world, get news from over there. Yes, you are getting their version of propaganda, but only by comparing propaganda from both sides can you begin to discern patterns and truth. It helps, at least.
I read The New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly, in magazines, for somewhat alternative viewpoints. They aren't truly liberal sources, but they lean more in that direction, and thus offer a different perspective from the mainstream conservative media. If you want to see just how dumb Bush is, read the New Yorker articles about his ideas.
If you want to know what's happening in globalization and economic forums, I like to check out www.indymedia.org for their alternative perspective. Now this is truly liberal news, and it is so vastly different from what passes as 'liberal' sources on mainstream press that you will truly see why the accusations of the "liberal media" is such a lie. Now, I think indymedia goes too far in that direction, but that's OK, it serves as a touchstone against which I can measure the conservative press. Only from indymedia, for example, would you learn about people being arrested for protesting economic summits and being held for weeks without charges. On the mainstream press, you'll learn about protests, and maybe a mention of some arrests. On indymedia, you'll learn what happnes to those arrested, and how the government illegally uses harrassment to discourage dissent. So by comparing both sides, you begin to get a glimmer of truth.
No, I don't rush to all these news sources for every story. A kitten caught in the tree and rescused by firefighters can be reported by anyone. Only the important stories need this level of scrutiny.
If you want extreme detailed analysis of U.S. propaganda, and specific, documented examples where the U.S. governement and the U.S. media lied to us, you might find the book Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky interesting. Conservatives criticize Chomsky in precisely the same way JWs criticize apostates. They claim Chomsky has an agenda, that his sources aren't true, and so on. But he provides so many footnotes you can go a library and see for yourself. He doesn't hide anything. So even if he has an agenda, which of course he does, he provides valuable evidence, fully documented, of times when you and I have been lied to. It's a bit mind-blowing, to be honest. This is where I read so much of the Latin American dirty tricks I've been talking about in this thread.
Hope this helps. Remember, propaganda exists on all sides. Only by viewing both sides can we come to an approximation of truth.