so what is a legitimate news outlet in your opinion
None. As I said in a different debate recently... Whenever possible, try to go beyond the headline, beyond the article, and to get as close to the original source as possible.
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How many journalists who are trying to rush a story to print have time to read a 40-page legal opinion, truly digest and understand the nuance, and accurately get that to print, not just a 400 word outrage piece about how the decision is going to destroy America?
Even more important, how many of their readers actually want nuance and accuracy over sensationalism?They're playing to their audience. The American People. Who are an easily-led, barely-thinking mob that don't have time for nuance or accuracy, and just want to receive enough information to make themselves believe that they're informed. And usually do so only in the most confirmation-bias enhancing way, only taking information from the sources they already agree with completely uncritically and dismissing any opposing source as flawed.
So what does the MSM do? They craft "a tale told by an idiot [reporter], full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing."
In short, my ire for the entire profession of journalism is to find a journalist who has deep expertise in what they're writing about is usually impossible. Technology writers rarely come from an engineering or even a technical marketing background where they had to work in their subject matter every day. Legal journalists rarely have law degrees; if they did they'd make more money practicing law. Medical journalists rarely have medical degrees; if they did they'd make more money practicing medicine.
Often they're non-experts trying to cover a subject with incredible depth and nuance and get it across to a reader [also a non-expert] in a very limited format, and their paycheck isn't driven by accuracy; it's driven by circulation [or in the modern world, advertising/clicks]. And who's going to make sure they're accurate? Their editor? Not at all--he's just as much a non-expert as everyone else in the chain.
So there's no real inherent check and balance to ensure accuracy. So there's no real reason to believe that the accuracy is very good; hence going to original sources whenever possible.
I've brought up this quote by Michael Crichton regarding he and physicist Murray Gell-Mann before, summarizing what he calls the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect":
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
I've seen this over and over in my own industry, data storage. I see people who earn their living writing ONLY about data storage making completely wrong arguments, completely misinterpreting data, and drawing completely wrong conclusions thereby.
Not all of them. There are good ones and bad ones, and anyone IN the industry can tell the difference. For the lay people outside our industry? They don't know which ones are talking sense and which ones are full of it.
So when I read a subject in which I have no inherent expertise, how can I tell which journalists are accurate and which ones are full of it? Only by going to original sources and trying to determine if the journalist is accurately relaying what was in the original source. MANY, MANY, MANY times I find that they've completely missed the point and relayed it badly--if they ever read it at all.
