The point the GP is making is that if your goal is to understand what's going on in the world, there are better resources than the news. Trying to find quality news sources is fairly labor intensive, and partially a game of whack-a-mole.
> Not reading the news at all, can make you seriously misguided because things are actually happen in this world for this reason or another and eventually something will impact you too.
You're not wrong, but your statement applies even more to those who put too much stock in the news, and IMO that's even worse than not reading the news. The choice of what to report on is seriously skewed even with the "good" news sources (man bites dog vs dog bites man phenomenon). In my experience, those who don't follow the news tend to have fewer biases and are aware of their ignorance, and account for it. Those who follow the news tend to be heavily biased - and they have all these "authoritative" sources to back their biases. To remove those biases, you have to really go all in and spend a lot of time to get a better perspective - time over 95% of folks do not want to put in.
I am a former news junkie. I spent a number of years trying to get at the heart of issues. For every issue of interest, I would try to get N different perspectives (hint, merely getting the "other" perspective is not enough). I would track claims by journalists to see who is more reliable. I kept a mini-DB of statistics on various topics at hand to keep track of which news articles are misleading (e.g. lies of omission, etc). I spent time discussing/debating to get perspectives I had missed out. And so much more.
I learned a lot, and in that sense you are right: You get a better understanding of the world. The problem is that curve is not monotonic. If you don't read the news, you start off at 0. As you start reading the news, you actually go into the negative (i.e. worse off than not reading). Only with a lot of effort will you get back into the positive. The average person will not get to the positive.
The lesson I learned that I harp on: With news consumption, the path of moderation is the worst path. You should either drastically reduce the consumption, or drastically increase it.
The other lesson is that once you "get there" after years of effort, you start running into diminishing returns. Each extra news piece/article does little at improving your understanding of the world. Which is why I quit - there were better uses of my time.