Journalists should NOT be neutral. If this is the case, how do they accurately cover the news? How does this influence your perspective on news?

Complete objectivity and neutrality is impossible for any human being to accomplish.  Each person has experienced different joys, adversities and emotions throughout their entire life that form their worldview, which ultimately dictates the lens through which that person sees the world and processes the information they gain.  Journalists are just the same.  They can no more tell a story without forming some sort of an opinion on it than anyone else.  The difference between journalists and everyone else, however, is the journalists' responsibilities to the public and the people they write for.  Even a journalist with strong opinions can tell the news accurately if they remember that they are not only writing for themselves, but for so many others as well - many of which have very different world views.  In order to accurately and unbiasedly report the news, a good reporter must respect differing opinions and realize that his opinion is not only dependent on so many factors outside his control, but that it isn't always necessarily right.  Humility is also an extremely important characteristic for a journalist who wants to accurately report the news because being humble reminds the reporter that he really, ultimately, doesn't know.  There is no way, sometimes, to know which side is right, if there is a "right side" at all, and keeping an open mind is the best way to discover that.

However, the most important  characteristic for a journalist to have is independence.  A journalist must maintain an independence from those they cover and truly know who they are and what their values are before they even begin to report.  They must not bind themselves to a party so tightly that when that party strays from what their values originally were, they allow themselves to be strayed along as well.  

Because I know that journalists are not neutral, I make sure to consider everything I read with a bit of skepticism.  I must first decide whether or not I think the journalist at least tried to be fair and accurate, and based on that conclusion, I then consider the facts they present.  Through this method, I have discovered that there is a fair amount of quality journalism and that I can accurately be informed by someone who has a very different opinion than mine, and in that way, I can also broaden my own

mind.