Not all knowledge is equal in value, and time spent learning one thing has an opportunity cost - it's time you can't spend, say, learning something more useful.
Understanding what went wrong, how it could've been caught, how to prevent it from happening in the future, options and tradeoffs for how to resolve things now that the damage has been done, etc. - this can be extremely useful and empowering. Even if you have no ability to impact the specific problem being discussed, you can draw parallels from those problems to the problems you do face in your own domains where you can have an impact. There may be no perfect solutions, but there may be better solutions, a better understanding of the problem, and an example of moving forward as one is best able to. This isn't exactly a message of "doom" though.
On the flip side, one can see yet another retelling of beating yet another dead horse - be they unpredictable black swan events with no real useful takeaways for planning, no useful nonobvious changes to policy to propose, or yet another deadlocked political quagmire of shouting heads that even the experts can't untangle - or something where the lessons are obvious and spelled out hundreds of hours of content ago and being applied - isn't terribly useful, encouraging, or empowering. Quite the opposite - if anything, they're depressing and disempowering.
To put it another way - flooding our information channels with low quality low content unactionable unrelatable useless unresearched unvetted "the sky is falling" shallow summaries of our inevitable doom displaces useful content about the problems of our world and more in-depth discussions about what we're experimenting with to try and fix them, what seems to be working, what was tried and failed, etc. Framed in this light, much of the news cycle has negative value: while it may let you "know" "more" about the world, you would've spent your time much more wisely by trying to learn from what other people are trying to do to fix things, or by attempting to fix things yourself.