I worked in the press for most of my working life. Journalists aren't evil cackling people out to twist the truth. They are stupendously ordinary and average. Some may be stupid and make mistakes - the same as in any other job.

As for the BBC, I like it a lot, especially the World Service; I'm listening to a programme at the moment which has been in Naples talking to local people about the novelist Elena Ferente, and has gone on to cover the Swedish practice of broadcasting a Donald Duck film at Christmas, with people phoning in in their thousands with messages; now it's about a man preserving the music of his native Asturias. Oh, dear, what can be their sinister underlying message!

When it's reporting on Ireland I often get annoyed by its patronising tone and its simply wrong idea that the British in Northern Ireland were the centre of good, for instance; I assume people in other countries feel the same about their countries - but I don't think I have ever heard them wilfully broadcasting anything that is incorrect or twisted.

When anything's going on in the Middle East, I turn on Al-Jazeera, which has excellent on-the-spot reporting.

I like the New Yorker and New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times for American news.

I listen to some French radio stations, with a little but limited ability to understand, ranging from France Inter and France Info to the rather intellectual and sophisticated Paris left-wing station Radio Libertaire. (The mainstream stations have introduced me to fabulous music tracks like Paris s'Eveille and Dans le Radio.)

I don't do Facebook - can never get the thing to work - but Twitter is fantastic for early and on-the-spot news (either by witnesses or by people quoting their local newspapers and radio and TV stations) of any breaking story. Sure, there are nutcases, but it's usually easy to hear their axes grinding from something as simple as the language they use ("cucks", "sheeple"…)

Mostly news is straight enough. Grains of salt and the sense your mother raised you with are a useful tool for filtering it.