I still go to other sites like the WSJ, Financial Times. But I rarely, if ever, watch the news on TV unless it's a breaking story, and when I do I find myself verbally correcting the errors of the talking head.
The First Amendment is to be cherished, but the First Amendment is silent on accuracy of speech. Indeed, the pamphlets published at the founding were vicious. In some ways, things haven't change in hundreds of years. What HAS changed, is this belief that reporting is objective. It isn't, it never was, but today's citizenry thinks we are supposed to get "objective reporting." I KNOW that's a fantasy, but I also know "our side" isn't pure either (American Thinker is often awful, and GP, while better, still gets it wrong too often).
Which, again, is why FR is such a great place. In 10 mins I can get a dozen opinions, reports, and feedback (which are often hysterically funny) covering life, politics, finance, art, anthropology, pandemics, and Møøse. That enables me to form a based opinion, e.g. Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretti nasti...
Watching how Facebook manipulates users’ news feeds to maximize advertising revenue did bring to mind how much I appreciate Free Republic. You are never fed material here, it’s a rich buffet of all sorts of news sources and a wide variety of opinions about them.
I have to admit that getting positive responses to one’s comments here probably does engage some of the same dopamine receptors that Facebook’s “Like” button does. I might have on rare occasions spent more time on FR than I intended to...