[magicalhippo]

You know what you can do? Subscribe to multiple papers, from both sides. Then you can do some comparison to see when things are reported differently.

When I grew up we had at least two papers, sometimes three. One was leaning left, other leaning right.

These days it's what Ground News[1] is trying to do from what I can gather, though haven't tried them as they don't cover the news in my country.

[1]: https://ground.news/

[CrimsonRain]

Yes, this is a good idea. Alternatively, instead of reading "news"^ go to source and read/listen/watch it yourself. Then make your own mind.

^: which somehow became someone else's opinions in last decade. There's still opinion column. But there's no difference these days. It didn't use to be like this in the past. Journalists used to report events and facts without commentary or would add commentary in the end with some label on it.

[magnetometer]

Why should there be only two sides?

[magicalhippo]

You can consider as many dimensions as you want. As I mentioned, for some time we had three papers regularly delivered, for additional perspective.

However typically, a single dimension is a useful first-order approximation[1], and so that's what's done in politics as well. As with all approximations, sometimes it works well and other times it does not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_approximation

[timeon]

That was probably mentioned from US-centric point of view where they have two-party system.

[magicalhippo]

I'm from Norway where we have currently ten parties in our parliament[1].

We still mostly talk about them as distributed along a left to right axis. Though as I mentioned it's not a perfect approximation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storting

[timeon]

Seems like Norway has also many constituencies which can favor dominant parties. However unlike US you have also leveling seats which balances it a bit.