It's an interesting question, Joe. Like most people, I guess, I don't 'trust' any media in an absolute sense, but I trust many of them to various extents. As Iains said, they all have paymasters, but in some cases, and indeed perhaps most cases, the ultimate paymaster is the audience they write for, with the nominal paymaster selecting and spinning to meet what they think is appropriate to keep the purchasers buying. Some have “entertainment” high up in their values, other have “analysis”. On the whole, I am interested in the more analytical papers like the Independent, the Guardian and the Times, which also tend to give the journalists a freer hand to write what they think. These papers also tend to be better at labelling a piece as 'Opinion', for example, to keep it distinct from the news pages.

Many years ago there was a TV show called 'That Was the Week That Was' which rewrote the lyrics to the theme tune every week to reflect the current news. On one occasion, I thought the lyrics captured this problem perfectly, and so the couplet has stayed with me ever since:

"One eye opened wide, one eye closed
And between the two the picture gets composed."

That captures it for me: you need to be alert to the biases, and to take account of them, but that should rarely be enough to reject them entirely. It does mean though, especially in the papers like the Sun that are generally low on the analysis scale, you may have to wade through a great deal of bias and spin to glean the underlying fact. And it is certainly true that when that happens a lot, the "return on time investment" is low enough that I can end up only wading through it when there is something specific to research.

And this is why I keep going on about Hansard. This are the formal minutes of what was said in the House of Commons, or Lords, or in Select Committees. Now it is true what when Corbyn or May speak (for example), there is already a bias in what they say. But I find it better to get to 'the source material' than rely on a Mudcat-poster's interpretation of the Guardian/Daily Mail editors interpretation of the journalist's interpretation of what they said.