Reading news articles that are informative can be thought provoking and improve my understanding of people and the world around me. Over time, many smaller pieces of information can accrue into an understandable whole, providing context for future experiences and information. If you never end up understanding the information thrown at you, or consume garbage news, then yeah, it won't help. It's possible you need to ingest a lot of background material to really make sense of the news in a useful and non-helplessness-inducing way.
The news to me is incremental history, economics, and political science. I wouldn't watch low-content information like daily TV news, but that's not the only option.
That said, you don't have to do it all the time, because sometimes, in your topic of interest, nothing much happens for a while... The most I do on an actual daily basis is read the top three headlines on the BCC News site, just to check that nothing incredibly crazy happened. Oh, and read too much HN, but that stuff can be interesting... and I mostly read the comments...
The news to me is incremental history, economics, and political science. I wouldn't watch low-content information like daily TV news, but that's not the only option.
That said, you don't have to do it all the time, because sometimes, in your topic of interest, nothing much happens for a while... The most I do on an actual daily basis is read the top three headlines on the BCC News site, just to check that nothing incredibly crazy happened. Oh, and read too much HN, but that stuff can be interesting... and I mostly read the comments...