Stopped reading and watching "The News". What a waste of time. If there's something important, someone will tell me about it.
Just my $0.02. Don't have to agree just my thoughts.
I used the read the news every day (and reading news magazines weekly); what ended up happening is that I also ended up reading through a lot of fluff and reading about a lot of inconsequential mere-fact-stating news. Even if you read the news every week, there's a ton of repeated analysis that you have to filter out. I ended up realizing that this was a legitimate waste of time.
Now I just read the news maybe every month. I'll usually only read long-form synthesis/analysis articles, rather than the kind of stuff that comes in through AP/Reuters. The exception being news articles coming in through HN, of course.
Going back to your analogy, while I'll keep myself updated on the major movements in the civil war in Syria, what I don't need to read about is how 12 people died in a bomb blast on Tuesday in <city> or something extremely-low-level like that.
I found over time that most people's idea of following politics was spending an inordinate amount of time memorizing either side's talking points. And to get really good at it (ie. arguing on forums) you'd simply need to memorize more of these talking points and exchange the proper insults (which always seemed to originate everywhere but my own mind).
Basically, I was done being a parrot and I'm healthier for it.