I haven't read this Salam but that "not a partisan so they must be unbiased" heuristic is pretty dodgy, particularly for an American columnist- that two party duopoly means you have a lot of right-libertarian and socialist/green analysts who regard each party as identical but are toting around some pretty serious ideological blinkers of their own, not to mention the cult of the sensible centrist people.
The right-wing meltdown you've got going on kind of screws with this though- for most countries I'd suggest that heterodox/lesser-of-two-evils party members from any group tend to suffer the least from illusions, but the impression I get is that in the US, the conservative variety no longer feels comfortable with the Republican party. This is all second hand though...
I generally agree with Bryan Caplan that news is generally useless:
However, there are some analytical sources of news that are exceptions.
Personally, what I find most stimulating is http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx . http://www.cato-unbound.org/ is also quite stimulating, although it isn't contemporary news. Then on the more non-news-y side, IEEE Spectrum and Communications of the ACM can occasionally be great. And while Scientific American has dumbed down in recent years, the featured articles in Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feed/type/article) are *amazingly* insightful. Two examples are below:
http://blog.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/330593/title/Inside_Job http://www.comoogl.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/74456/title/Healthy_Aging_in_a_Pill
You usually don't even get analyses like these in Science or Nature.
And http://www.newgeography.com/ is surprisingly insightful.
What do people here think of The Atlantic? It's better than other news sources, and I was impressed with it when I was in 8th grade. And some columnists, particularly Reihan Salam, are great (Reihan isn't in the position of supporting *any* politician or party, so that puts him in a position where I don't suspect him of twisting facts [even a little bit] to support his position - something that I do often suspect for people like Ezra Klein and other left-wing pundits). But even The Atlantic does seem to be too much in line with mainstream opinion.
Other than that, I get most of my analysis from Gene Expression and Information Processing. I'm not too much of an economist yet, so I don't really read the economics blogs. FuturePundit/ParaPundit is right on many things, but its blogposts don't contain too much depth in them.