Media criticism is a journey! It's good that you wanted to question sources and spent some time doing so. The annoying thing about media criticism is that there are a lot of tropes and think tanks and journalistic malpractices. And often no alternative information, so to understand a given news piece you might have to use a biased source with a poor track record (e.g. New York Times), look into the author, review all of the sources, try to see what might be accurate vs. what is PR BS, and still end up (correctly) thinking, "it's only 50:50 that the main claim us even true". After a while it gets easier because you know the think tanks, or already know enough about the subject matter to spot BS, or immediately notice that a given article is full of unsourced editorialization masquerading as journalism.

If you like podcasts, Citations Needed is an entertaining one that by two journalists goes over a trope or topic per episode. There are also transcripts available. I also recommend that people check out FAIR.org, a site focused on media criticism and more specifically calling out ongoing bad faith practices for current topics