Most advice about avoiding one-sided news boils down to "read more sources." That's true but vague. Here's a concrete method you can use on any single article, right now, without any tools.
Not the topic — the specific claim. "Remote work reduces productivity" is a claim. "Remote work" is a topic. Write the claim down in one sentence before doing anything else.
This is the single most useful question in evaluating any argument. If the article claims X causes Y, ask: what would we expect to see if X did not cause Y? Then check whether the article rules that out, or just ignores it.
It's easy to find a bad rebuttal to any claim — a rushed comment section reply, a strawman. That's not useful. Search using the terms an informed opponent would use, not the terms that make them sound unreasonable. Look for domain experts who disagree, not just anyone who disagrees.
Not as a "gotcha," but as one input among several. Funding sources, institutional incentives, and publication incentives all shape which claims get made confidently and which get hedged.
If you can't state the strongest opposing view in one sentence with a reason attached, you don't understand it well enough yet to have an informed opinion on the original claim.
This process takes 10–15 minutes per article if you do it properly, which is why most people don't. Steelman is a Chrome extension that runs this process for you: click it while reading any article, and it shows you the 3 most persuasive counterarguments to that article's claims, with reasoning — using your own AI API key, nothing stored on any server.
Try Steelman