And this is where the "conversation" piece may come in with a 21st century twist. Enough folks highlighted it as the "most important thing" to make it widely known via retweets and likes.
You could also look at something covered more by regular news sources, like how the GOP's attempted repeal of Obamacare was blocked by public response once it became clear how many people would lose health insurance coverage. Suddenly, the repeal that was reasonably popular overall (and very popular on the right) was much less so. Would the repeal having quietly passed through Congress because nobody was paying attention to national news have been an improvement?
The author's argument is one in favor of selfishness: being a well-informed citizen of your state or country does not benefit you personally, so why bother? I actually think that the logic does hold, it's just that the implication of everyone listening to his advice is that the country becomes less informed as a whole, which sounds really, REALLY bad to me. People's average level of political and current event knowledge already seems dreadfully low, someone pushing to make it lower yet...why?
I don't think that the author point at all. He is arguing that the news in their modern form have mostly become a form of entertainment.
I will hasard that someone who would forever stop following the news but actually engaged in any form of local actions connected to their outrage of choice even in the most sporadical of manners would have a disproportionally larger impact on society than a well informed individual. Heck, any kind of local engagement, be it the knitting club or kids soccer, will probably have a larger impact. The news is thankfully not the only source of news.
> But to what end?
> Aside from feeling bad for the victims –and worrying the same thing might happen to you – you’re powerless to make a positive impact. Hearing the news is merely a distraction.
> “But,” you might argue, “everything on the news doesn’t revolve around tragedies. I need to know what’s going on in the world!”
> Do you really?
> When was the last time you watched the news and thought, “thank God I saw that. Let me go take action.”?
> I’ll answer for you: probably never.
> If that’s the case, what’re you actually getting from the news? Aggravated? Wound up? Certainly not informed about anything important.
> Most of the time, watching the news is as useful as watching The Jersey Shore. You’re watching it to turn off your brain and mainline outrage.
He's not arguing about something that's not "real news"; an enormous tragedy occurring somewhere, like a tsunami killing many people, obviously qualifies as real news. He's arguing that it leading to "just outrage", just sentiment, is not productive. But that's only true if you look at it in an individual sense, of being productive in your own life. If you look at it being productive in aggregate, in society as a whole, the reasoning doesn't work anymore.
Now, you could make the argument that the author is unaware of the many thousands of times that outrage in its various forms -- like protests, or riots, or revolutions -- has led to significant changes; perhaps he is simply astoundingly ignorant of essentially all history, and thus doesn't know that outrage can do things like, say, get America to leave the Vietnam war, or get a President to resign from office, to use two well-known examples. But I'm not sure that's a more charitable or plausible take.
That's where we disagree and I think I see the root of our disagreement. Reading your last paragraph, you seem to link news consumption and actual actions like protests, riots and revolution. I don't think this link exists. Most of those are actually started by activists and stem from local engagement (unionism, political organizations). It is very removed from news consumption which is not the only way of being informed.