From what you said, I think you're doing it wrong. Yes, individual news media outlets tend to spew a fair amount of drivel and/or propaganda. But if you follow a variety of news sources with very different biases, you can learn a lot more than you'd ever know if you either didn't read the news or stuck with a narrow range of sources.
For instance, suppose you're interested in the goings-on in Ukraine. Read several Western sources, and then also read one or more Russian sites (e.g. RT) and one or more sites from places that don't have a dog in this fight (e.g. Al Jazeera). Finally, go to vice.com and watch their "Russian Roulette" series, which is by far the best (and ballsiest) journalism I've seen so far on the subject.
You'll probably come away with an opinion that is messy and that doesn't fit with either "side". This is not so great for winning online arguments (except by advocating one devil or the other), but you'll understand the situation far better.
I'll also offer a different plug for mainstream media (of the somewhat intelligent variety). The only news sites I actually pay to subscribe to are the New York Times and the Economist. They both have extremely obvious and fairly similar biases (although NYT usually pretends to be objective when no such thing is possible). I disagree substantially with both of them about as often as I agree with them on anything contentious, but I'm not reading them to have my opinions echoed back to me. Both of them do a pretty good job of boiling down the opinions (and the range of opinions, usually rather narrow) of the financial and political elites that run world affairs. I find that it's really important to keep a finger on the pulse of what those people are thinking.
As an example, the Economist often plugs the next speculative bubble around when they're starting to take off. Shale gas and oil are the first things to come to mind, although a number of other examples (including housing c. 2004) can be found. I wouldn't (even if I had money, which I don't) invest based on this information, because predicting the end of bubbles is a fool's errand, but it can help to show you the sorts of things that might happen in the near economic future.
Also, the NYT's "Room for Debate" is just like a more verbose version of The Onion's "American Voices". A third of the opinions are obvious statements of fact, a third are absurdly wrong, and the last third say little of any importance. For added entertainment, I like to keep the Onion and the NYT in adjacent tabs and flip back and forth. Often I'll find myself reading a "news" article and laughing heartily at the satire, only to look up and realize I'm on the NYT, not the Onion! That experience is priceless, or at least worth more than $7.50/mo.
