That's assuming you can trust the news to be impartial and unbiased which they rarely are, because most media is owned by a few oligarchs or entities who have a specific agenda to push.
As for voting, I find these tools that ask you questions and tell you which candidates/parties best match your beliefs to be enough to know how to cast my vote. Not that it really matters, as you've said but it still lets me do my civic duty without the years of stress and anxiety in-between elections and during the elected's mandate. I'll leave it up to other to get needlessly outraged by following the news.
I don't trust the news, but on FB and Twitter I can select my own sources. Doesn't mean I automatically trust them, but at least I can get a multitude of perspectives and background information that the news omits.
The society would be mich better off. I find your equation of "news is like voting" appauling. News has almost no informational value like covering Russel Brand when he was running around telling people not to vote.
We need more people voting and speaking to their representatives, and fewer people outraged about something some random brainless celebtrity said.
Why are so many people in this thread equating news with celebrity or outrage culture? News is about learning and understanding current events. If you don't understand current events, you can't be an educated voter. If you have a societal obligation to vote, you have a societal obligation to follow the news at the very least whenever there is an election in your area and those occur much more frequently than once every 2 or 4 years.
People equate news with celebrities and outrage because that's what 80% of airtime is dedicated to.
If you want to be educated voter, pick any journal or periodical like The Economist or The New European. Their journalism will actually cover an issue in some depth, from whatever is their biased perspective.
> pick any journal or periodical like The Economist or The New European
But those are news too. Why are we judging news based off the worst examples? If you have a problem with the news you are consuming, find some other source. Don't write off all news consumption as bad.
Now that it has become such a media item, how many shooters in the past few years do you believe had a partial motive in a near certainty they would achieve broad recognition in their otherwise meaningless and miserable lives? When you read the news and Wikipedia on the latest shooter, you’re contributing to future shooters in about the same magnitude as being a single voter.
Just like voting has almost zero effect. However, is not voting wise?
In what direction would society move if nobody watched the news?