one journalist whose work I greatly respect is Chris Hedges. He was the NYT Bureau Chief for the Middle East for some years, speaks Arabic fluently, and was pushed out of the NYT for criticizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq at a college commencement speach. Before being pushed out, he also covered the Yugoslav war for the NYT... He's quite brilliant, has won a Pulitzer and written numerous books, is buddies with Chomsky, and teaches in a prison, among many other accomplishments.
Unfortunately, a lot of the journalists with the best records are at least as disenchanted with the Dem party as they are with the MSM and so are not well-regarded here at DU; but if you can tolerate/discount their anger at the Dem establishment, I do also like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.
Taibbi lived in the USSR during the 1990s and speaks Russian, and his insight into matters relating to Russia is valuable; he also really dug into the causes of the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, and imho was just about the only reporter who accurately described the role of credit derivatives (the losses attributable to which vastly dwarfed those from mortgage-backed securities alone). I think Taibbi also did tremendous service in his analysis of the Twitter files, which revealed the extent to which the government was pressuring Twitter (among other platforms) to censor true as well as false information (I practice I consider to be ultimately self-defeating as well as illegal).
Before becoming a journalist, Glenn Greenwald was a lawyer specializing in Constitutional law; so I particularly appreciate his analyses of legal issues – e.g., untangling the nuances and actual effects of court decisions, legislation, & other legal matters.
= new reply since forum marked as read