Opposition Research + Spin Reading

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Anyone else do this?

I make a habit of reading several different political blogs and news sources of various ideological bents including those with which I vehemently disagree, so as to keep abreast of news stories and try to understand how people I disagree with think. There is also the secondary purpose of trying to sift out the truth from all the spin, if nothing else it's a useful mental exercise to read different accounts of the same event from say Counterpunch and BigGovernment and reconciling the vastly different spin given. I like to think that this routine both keeps me from getting complacent about taking anything I read at face value, and also helps me to better construct my own arguments for and against various policies and ideas. Perhaps most usefully, it shows me what not to do when trying to write persuasively, which is to make the spin so blatant that it screams it's bias right off the page. NPOV isn't just for Wikipedia, I'm convinced that the main difference between a respected news source and a tabloid isn't so much what is written but how it's written, something any politically inclined poster ought to take note of.

A by no means comprehensive sampling of my personal blog roll:

http://www.counterpunch.org
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/
http://www.cato.org/
http://volokh.com/
http://www.breitbart.com/
http://www.davekopel.com/2dAmendment.htm
http://www.politico.com/
http://www.mediaite.com/
http://mediamatters.org/
http://www.salon.com/
http://reason.com

Now which ones I give more credence to and which ones I get a fact check a bit more aggressively I'll leave to the imagination, though it shouldn't be too hard for anyone familiar with my postings to guess.