What's wrong with being uninformed, especially when it comes to "news"?
Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating fear probably increases viewership. If the media always said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering aren't your family.
In a less extreme example, if a big project came into your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this news would make you want to get involved politically to advocate against the destruction of it. But when that happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to even write an email to your local politician to oppose it because you didn't know about it, other families suffered.
It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3 times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it was definitely not healthy and did not make them better citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with events on the other side of the world (or the other side of your country) if you're not also able and willing to do something about it. I dunno about applying the "privilege" label to that—in fact, the fewer resources you have, the less point there is in it.
Things that happen across the world affect us here too. Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and resettling all around the world. They could be moving in down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing what's happening around the world allows one to be empathetic to the situations of others.
Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have to run the whole empire.
Again, I think that end would also be better served if a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting with textbooks and classics in political science, history, and economics (I doubt anyone who's mined those well already, needs any help picking their next high-value read).
Nope, not my duty. My duty is to elect politicians who enact policy affecting me. If a politician enriches my country at the expense of another, it is my duty to vote for him, for the sake of myself and my family. No one is a citizen of the world.
Watching the news is not helping these people.
Hence why I said most. I definitely agree that being exposed to outside events can be important for sympathizing with those affected (and possible helping them), but at the same time, one does not need to be aware of everything going on in the world.
But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of your time being informed about things so you know how to vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time. Freedom isn't free, eh?
Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary. You're only obligated by your own morality. You may choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
I don’t think you fairly addressed his question at all in this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague word: “things”.
People who live anywhere will always take an interest in information which directly affects them, or that they can profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses. Generally there are multiple means of attaining this information and the “news” in the mass media sense is just one of them. I don’t for example pay close attention to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which probably missed important details and which is usually written from a biased perspective. This is true for any number of domains I don’t specialize in (almost all of them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along the way that can shape my future actions.
So lets come back to that word, “things”, which things should people be informed of that you get from the news media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
Neither do I.
If you think you're learning about social, political, and economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned anything from the news that I couldn't have learned talking to someone else who watched it instead.