Thomas Friedman in one of his recent columns made the point that the Daily Show and Colbert report are probably two of the most legitimate news shows on cable TV right now.
If you are willing to settle for the non-up-to-the-very-secondness of non-cable news media there are still some very good options out there.
PBS has some great programming. Not all of it is exactly news, but I'm quickly getting hooked on some their shows like independent lens.
Nearly all of the Economist is available online for free. It is nicely chopped up between columns, the print edition, various blogs on certain topics into RSS feeds to make for easy reading.
Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy have most of their current editions online for free. The latter has a fairly decent blog.
I really like Al Jazeera as they report on areas not very well covered in the developing world by anglophone media. The BBC covers commonwealth nations to some extent, but has some holes in coverage for the rest of the developing world.
And for political gossip, the real Perez Hilton of politics, nothing beats the Drudge Report.
Another really good source of news is the New York Review of Books (most of the content is online for free). While it is mostly cultural news, the last two issues have had really good articles about the Iraq War and that is how I found this
blog. The current edition also has great articles about Iran, the GOP and Romney.
There are really good sources out there in English, it is just a bit of a chore to find them. And staying well informed using them won't raise your blood pressure like the mass market, hysteria inducing, yellow journalism that is most of the "mainstream" media in the US.
