Today, it's hard to trust mainstream media for accurate/fair reporting. CBS may be mostly BS, and Fox News tends to lean hard right. So it's more important now than ever to explore alternate media sources.
Platforms such as Substack have some amazing independent journalists, as well as long-time legacy media reporters who have made the switch to be independents. Here are a few sources we read/view on a daily basis:
Aaron Parnas (independent journalist)
Aaron Parnas
Aaron Parnas is a one-man publishing machine. He does multiple Instagram posts per day with mini (~60 seconds or less) political news and legal updates. He also has an awesome podcast and YouTube channel. If you want to quickly catch up with everything that happened on any given day in political news, subscribe to all his things:
Amanda Nelson
Amanda's Substack refers to her as "Amateur historian, politics nerd." She offers some great breakdowns of government acronyms and jargon, the inner workings of ongoing legal cases, and much more.
Amanda has a recurring segment (like this one) called "Donald Trump's Ls of the week."
Glenn Kirschner
Glenn does a live community meeting almost every night (not just weekdays...but every night) on Substack. He was a former U.S. Army prosecutor, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and a former NBC News/MSNBC legal analyst.
Ground NewsGround News is a cool independent news site/app that lets you compare how different outlets cover the same story. Each story has a bulleted summary, and then details as far as how many sources are covering the story, and which way the bias leans.
For example, on February 1, 2026, a story was published about how 5-year-old Liam Ramos was released from ICE custody. Here's the summary:
Sample Ground News story summary
And here are the coverage details:
Sample Ground News story bias
Meidas Touch (independent news organization)
Meidas Touch
The Meidas Touch network is comprised of the Meiselas brothers (Ben, Brett and Jordan) and was formed in 2020 with the purpose of stopping the reelection of Donald Trump. Today it's an online news network that releases several videos/podcasts every day, focusing heavily on the Trump administration's activities.
Mercado Media (Minnesota-based independent news organization)
Mercado Media
Mercado Media has done a ton of unedited livestreams during ICE activities, protests and other key events happening in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge.
Status Coup News
Similar to Mercado Media, Status Coup News has been on the ground in Minneapolis providing long livestreams of ICE activities/attacks, protests, vigils and interviews with activists and officials.
(At the time of this writing, their staff member Zachary Roberts is trying to raise enough money to come back to Minnesota to continue covering news stories.)
