If you avoid the news long enough, eventually you will find that your rights have been reduced without you noticing.
You absolutely can take real action with financial implications for yourself from news items - I made £1k from a single Telegraph article on how the Royal Mail IPO was grossly underpriced. I've adjusted my pension allocation on the assumption that the pound would fall against the dollar and done quite well on that too.
But for much news it's not so much "achieving a positive return" as avoiding a negative. It's the Arthur Dent effect: one day you wake up to find aliens about to bulldoze your planet, and they tell you that you were warned and should have known about it. There's a lot of that these days. I'm surrounded by people who have taken Brexit-related actions of one kind or another, especially all the Europeans who suddenly have to register to avoid deportation. I factored it in to my job change, not as a major factor, but it's convenient to be working for a US multinational rather than a company exporting or importing physical goods from the EU.
I don't even seek out that much news any more, it just keeps leaking in via social media. I should make more effort to follow local news, because that really is the place where I can find out if someone's going to put a bypass through my house or disrupt my bus route, and have a chance of stopping it.
My last news I took action on was the weather, which happens rather often actually.
But I must disagree with your final question, because I don't think percentages matters. An extreme example: if you read about some new life saving drug for a disease that a loved relative of yours have, how many useless articles is that worth? Twenty years of articles? Thirty? A lifetime?
- Avoiding the daily news likely will NOT make you any less informed.
- Avoiding constant media consumption will NOT give power to a central authority and reduce your rights.
A lot of the counter arguments here are seemingly from individuals defending the amount of time they spend consuming content.
To those who read the news religiously, what was the last news item that you, personally, took action on? Can you remember it? Ok. GREAT!
--> Now, be objective with yourself. What % of news items did YOU take action on? Did it give you a >0 return on invested time?