When I was in high school I wanted to learn Russian, and did a not half-bad job of it. No teacher, just a friend (also monolingual English) and public-library textbooks.
I followed the news about the USSR in American newspapers. But I also subscribed to Izvestiya.
Now, they said different things. Often they talked about the *same* event but gave different information. Between learning to read between the lines in the Russian (because some things were out-and-out censored) and in the English (because some things were culturally disapproved of in a free press) I usually got a good idea what was actually going on. The Russian put constraints on my eisegesis, my "reading into" the American media sources, and the English helped train me on how, exactly, to read between the lines. (Of course, political speeches were just "blah-blah-blah" on both sides. They're pure spin and rhetoric and are billed as such.)
Eventually I got good enough at reading between the lines in Russian to know that the great article pointing out the glorious tractor production for the year and the phenomenal wheat harvest meant the average tractor would have to last 50+ years and that the average Russian had better damned well live on 10 lbs of wheat that year. In other words, the news was often there but put in ways that allowed the echo-chamber thinkers to say, "Rah-rah us!!!" and the censor to say, "That's fine"; but in ways that let the sceptics say, "Aw, shit."
My first real lesson in critical thinking: What you see is not all there is. An article can be 100% truthful and 90% misleading, but only because you don't look for information that contradicts your confirmation bias even when it's butt obvious that there's something more going on. We screen out what we don't want to know, we want to believe we're right, and in American society it's become very, very easy to pay professionals and exceptional amateurs to do that labor of self-love for us. They pre-screen out and pre-spin news so that we don't even have to have any wear and tear on our perceptual filters and biases.
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