News coverage has alwas been biased, val. And not always in the way you might expect.
When Orwell returned to England after fighting with the POUM against Franco he studied the English newspaper reports of events that he had been an eye-witness to. He had been fully expecting the right-wing press to be telling lies but what made him really lose his shit was the discovery that the left-wing press had also been printing lies and falsehoods; things he knew to be untrue because he had been there and witnessed what had reallly been happening. What Orwell was forgetting though, was his own bias.
At school my history teacher one did a great lesson (I'm sure she did more than one, but it's this one I remember!). It was the first lesson of the day and we had just been at assembly. The teacher told us she'd not been able to make the assembly and wanted us all to write a report on what had happened in it. She then got on with marking or something, I rememeber thinking it was a bloody cheek and questioning what this had to do with history!
Anyway, once we'd all finished she collected them in and then set us some other work. A while later she stopped us and told us that she'd read all our reports and written her own one, which she then read aloud to us. It was far, far better than any of the individual reports that we'd written, giving a much broader and accurate representation of what had happened in assembly than any of ours.
The purpose of the lesson was to teach us that a secondary source can be better than a primary source, and that the best way to produce a decent secondary source is to read lots of primary sources first. And this applies to secondary sources too, you'll get a better understanding the more you read.
You can't trust any indivdual media or news outlet entirely. Sure, some are more reliable than others but you nead to consume a broad range and work out for yourselves which bits are most likely to be reliable from each one. This isn't made easier by those who deliberately disseminate disinformation, and it may seem like there is more of this happening now with social media etc,. but as a concept, it's nothing new.