Honest question, how do you turn off your empathy for the suffering of your fellow countrymen? Which is what ignoring their plight would require (at least, it would for me).
Save your outrage for things you have first hand knowledge of or knowledge of through trusted contacts.
The world did ok before 24/7 news, so it's not like you, king of the world, need to be up to the minute informed on whatever thing you're supposed to take your outrage vengence upon today.
What about that? Coming upon news where you can make a difference right now, by sending money to NGOs with workers on the ground.
Say there is a situation that Alfred have the power to effect. To reliably cause change for the good Alfred must:
(1) Identify a problem and its root cause
(2) Change the root cause
(3) Confirm that the problem is solved.
There are people who claim you can leap straight to (2) and skip (3). These are people who (if they ever honestly checked) would discover that they are not responsible for very much positive, meaningful change. They are flailing, looking busy and have the best of intentions.
For anything reported in the news step (1) represents a huge investment of time because the news has probably got the situation at least somewhat wrong. To say Alfred has a moral responsibility to do something is equivalent to saying Alfred has a moral responsibility not to read the news; because Alfred doesn't have enough time or resources to confirm what the problem is for all the sad stories he can read about.
In your specific example - 'sending money to NGOs with workers on the ground' - Alfred would probably divert a lot of money to organisations who are good at emotive advertising campaigns with administrative costs verging on embezzlement. We have good historical evidence that Alfred's best bet is to go all-in on capitalism, make a fortune, and then do some philanthropy to maximise his impact.
Giving to a worthy cause creates incentives that are terrible. I can't be convinced that it is a good idea. I have a lot more respect for people who volunteer time, but even then I'm suspect of their ability to correctly diagnose the problem they are trying to fix.
The term 'root cause' is problematic because it assumes a simplistic cause-effect model. However, a problem may be the consequence of a complex 'chain reaction' of events. Most charities identify a single event leading up to a problem and focus on eliminating/mitigating that.
E.g. a problem is: people in country X dying unnaturally every year. The immediate cause is starvation, which is indirectly caused by famine as a result of multiple factors like poor farming technology and government policy. There is no 'root cause', and attempting to solve the farming problem might be much less resource efficient harder than just providing emergency rations every year.
Another problem with your wording is 'change for the good'. If famine death is reduced by 100 deaths for each 1000USD donated, is this a 'change'? Or would Alfred only take action if it would possibly result in entirely stopping the deaths 100%?
I agree with your point about incentives in philanthropy though, there are some organizations that do a better job than others about that.
And if a person is improving their community by their conduct, they recieve their information through direct interaction, rendering news irrelevant.
I volunteer lots of my time with various organizations and I didn't need anyone in the news media to tell me that what I'ma doing is important and valuable.
For example, I don't get upset when a plane crashes or there's a mass shooting. I can imagine myself in the position of the victims. I can imagine if someone I loved died in a situation like that and I can simulate some of the grief and anger I think I'd feel. But that exercise seems sort of selfish to me. In general, these kind of tragic events don't affect my mood.
I do sometimes experience this kind of empathy when I'm reading history or a human-interest story about some tragic or unfair situation.
It seems to me that many people assume that all good behavior flows from empathy. I don't think this is true. I use various philosophical viewpoints to justify (or rationalize) my behavior: sometimes utilitarianism, sometimes the categorical imperative, and often a vague sort of humanism.
Let’s consider starting from this standpoint instead: Everyone has differing levels of empathy and it’s not going to be the same for every person. Despite this, we all need to get along and work towards whatever our individual goals are peacefully.
Given this vast spectrum of empathy, advice from the extreme edges of that spectrum (“just tune out all news 100%” on one end, “cry for every single suffering being everywhere” on the other end) is particularly useless, because the only reason this situation even exists in the first place is because of extremism / polarization.
Where do we go from here?