A few tips:
- Understand everyone has a perspective and a bias, even among legitimate news sources.
- Beware clickbait. Exclamation points, capital letters, teaser headlines that don't give an accurate summary of the content of the story and the such are huge red flags.
- If it sounds too good to be true, and NOBODY else is reporting it, then yes, it's probably too good to be true.
- Look and see if they have a track record. First with their own in-house archives, but also check archive.org, which crawls most Web sites every few weeks.
- Remember that no one fact-checks the fact-checkers. Like news outlets, they too have their biases, so when Politifact says Donald Trump is the biggest liar in the field and Bernie Sanders has never told a flat-out lie, ever (and yes, they did claim this), you have reason to be skeptical.
There is a difference between biased news and outright made-up fake news.