I don't think ignoring the news or "the media" has ever been (or will ever be) good advice. I think it's important to be a critical consumer of information - something that, in this age of information, has become increasingly more challenging. Intelligence really has nothing to do with it, because I've heard plenty of dumb people saying they know something is true because "they seen it on Facebook" but, likewise, I've seen plenty of smart, educated people perform all manner of mental gymnastics to bend reality into a shape fitting their worldview.
I'm not immune to either and have been guilty of both, but one tool I've found to be very helpful is the Ad Fontres interactive media bias chart (Google it, it's very easy to find).
They take a huge sampling from across just about every media outlet you can imagine, from large to small, left to right, and rate them on two scales:
Overall Source Reliability, which runs from "Fact Reporting" (e.g. the UPI) to "Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info" (e.g. National Enquirer).
Political Bias, which of course runs from extreme left, to extreme right.
Looking at the chart in aggregate is really interesting (and instructive), but it's also a handy tool for deep diving an individual source. Looking at individual sources like that lets you see that even media boogeymen like CNN and Fox News do some really quality reporting (albeit with slight left/right bias, which I think is ok), but both sources indulge in "analysis" that becomes progressively less fact based (and further left/right biased) as they move into full-on "opinion". But, here's the thing: even CNN and Fox News do a very good job of labeling their articles as "analysis" or "opinion" where appropriate. You have to know what you're reading even within a given source.
Myself, I'm an AP guy. They actually do a really good job and have lots of interesting exclusives. Absolute "safest" if you are really allergic to any bias or anything resembling analysis or opinion is the UPI. It's *extremely* dry, though. I hear a lot of people say that they want the media to tell them just the facts...in my opinion, most people who say that don't really mean it, otherwise UPI.com would be much more popular. It's extremely boring.
