Even reputations are hotly debated in this climate. I think a good habit is to read from as many sources as possible, including controversial ones, and making a private determination as to how to weight reporting.
There are enough sources supporting any worldview that there's a real risk that you'll just end up supporting whichever one you started with. I have no idea how you can do better though.
There's no shortage of people who share that same "belief", but would end up writing down a different and conflicting list of people than you, with no loss of accuracy
I agree it’s not a new phenomena and never said that it was. I’d argue that our news was historically fair-minded up until the recent mass-scale polarization.
There are plenty of good journalists with high reputation that you can certainly take more than a pinch of salt with.