one of the big things that news papers do is pick through various sources and figure out which are important and which aren't, if you go directly to the source and you aren't careful, you can get stovepiped[1].
More generally who the hell has time to go directly to the wire and read all the raw sources and figure out which are accurate, which are relevant, and which you should care about? Journalists, do.
That's not practical in most cases. Nor is it even necessary if you're simply trying to grasp larger socio-political developments.
All you really need is (1) healthy skepticism that is prepared to tentatively accept facts and narratives as presented, and (2) sufficient interest to remember the highlights and contours of previous reporting. Bad journalism invariably becomes inconsistent and contradictory journalism.
You don't need to be an expert in the Ukrainian armed conflict to have realized that popular Russian news outlets propound falsehoods; over the years they've published contradictoryfacts while reporting by other outlets has remained steadily consistent. The consistency of lies and misleading narratives is drastically more difficult to maintain than of objective statements of substantive facts and narratives rooted in those facts.[1]
Knowing the truth and identifying falsehoods are two different but related processes. As you filter out the lies and biases the truth comes into focus, albeit an incomplete truth.[2] But in most cases that's more than enough to stay usefully informed on matters of general import.
TL;DR: News literacy simply requires tentative acceptance of substantive facts and narratives firmly supported by substantive facts while keeping a long-term memory of the highlights of previous reporting. The latter has been made infinitely easier with the advent of the internet because locating previous news stories has become trivial; questions about consistency can in most cases be quickly resolved with brief Google sleuthing.
[1] Of course, as the Iraq War proved it's not impossible, at least not over the course of a year or less, but even then the narrative was transparently based on a single fact--the curveball informant--that was sufficient alone to cast the narrative into doubt. The American public (including myself) was overly credulous of the narrative because we shared the same biases as the reporters. But as practical matter this case is the exception, not the rule, unless you want to get really philosophical about things.
[2] In general that's another indicator of good reporting: not claiming more than the facts support. Suffice it to say that this is different than FUD, but I'd rather not get into it. My point is simply that there are tools (heuristics or algorithms, if you like) that promote literacy of major issues without requiring one to become a subject-matter expert.
That's obviously not true, because for virtually everybody, there are plenty of subjects where we're simply not qualified to do that sorting, and will only mislead ourselves by trying.
The virtue of good reporting is that they can cultivate expert sources and analysis that you don't have access to.
More generally who the hell has time to go directly to the wire and read all the raw sources and figure out which are accurate, which are relevant, and which you should care about? Journalists, do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping#Stovepiping_pre_an...