No matter what rubbish you want to believe in, there's somebody out there who will be able to accomodate you. You can find something to back up anything you want. I prefer the dialectic method, you listen to both sides of an argument, their propaganda and our propaganda, and you contrast and compare where they agree and disagree and come up with a synthesis that best reconciles the two points of view. In general, what you come up with is that both sides are prevaricating and misleading, but one is much worse than the other. You pick the side that appears most truthful, but you take what it says with a mountain of salt.

Now there's no reason you can't do this with multiple inputs, but I've found that this tends to give all the points of view an equal weight, making it a lot harder to be selective, and your own conflict of interest tends to pollute your judgement. You have to do some culling and some winnowing and you can't afford to be the only one doing it, either. That's where some form of external critical review and collective criticism comes in handy. A free, competitive press is the best way to do this, they can't afford to lie too much because sooner or later they will lose readership to someone more truthful. This is essentially the system we have now, and with all its flaws (yes, I've caught them trying to pull an occasional fast one myself) it is the best guarantee we have of getting even close to the truth.

Just because the main stream media isn't perfect doesn't mean I'm going to trust a stranger who is telling me exactly what I want to hear.