I know he has been using Politifacts for a long time now. I don't know if he also uses Factcheck.org. He listens to Young Turks, Fox News (but doesn't think it is always "fair and balanced", and CNN, and he has online friends who discuss politics so he is trying to find out as much as he can from a variety of sources so that he can better participate in these discussions and also make up his own mind. I know he reads a from a lot of different online sources. I think Huffington Post is one of them. He usually listens to his dad's opinions, my opinions, his grandfather's opinions and the online friends who I think are 20 somethings but he makes up his own mind and then tries to convince us that he is right. He carries his iPhone around and when we say something he is usually able to quickly find something that he just read that totally contradicts what we just said and then I don't know what to say. I don't have time to read everything he is reading but I do read some of it and try to discuss things with him to the best of my ability.
Young Turks, Fox News, and Huffington Post are all politically biased sources. CNN also has a strong bias, it's just that it's not towards a particular viewpoint, it's towards sensationalism. So yeah, if his diet of news involves so many negative sources, I could see why he'd be so frightened.
Political discussions online have a tendency towards increased polarization, too. Sometimes you can learn something new about the other side, but mostly you're just being trolled.
In your place, I'd recommend some more moderate sources be added to the mix. For instance, I like to make Yahoo my first stop for news, because they're just gathering things from a lot of different sources... major newspapers, TV stations, blogs, AP and Reuters, etc.
I'd also recommend looking at primary sources whenever possible, because it gives you the opportunity to access the unvarnished truth. For example, I live on the Gulf Coast, and the coverage of hurricane season is outrageously sensationalist on local TV. Given all this awful information, I turned to the internet to educate myself on the subject, and now I have a variety of primary sources I evaluate myself before ascribing to any hype about any one storm. My sources include the National Hurricane Center, the Navy's Meteorology and Oceanography Center, and the storm model output as provided by Florida State University.
