I think the problem with using news sources for models is that it's almost certainly going to be slanted, misleading, deceptive, etc...

Unless you wanted to to create some language models to do tasks that involve, say, lying or expressing one-sided opinions (lol, or accepting money from people with an agenda in exchange for pushing it for them), you're probably better off looking somewhere else. That said, I think it would be a very interesting project - no question about that...