When I was in college I was a new believer having been baptized a year earlier, I lived in a brother's house, and we didn't have a TV. I was doing much better in school since getting saved, I was also going to church meetings three days a week, we had morning watch in the word of God each morning and we had a prevailing campus gospel ministry. In every way I felt my life, my health including mental health, and my joy were much better.
At this time I was in an english class which was talking about how TV and mass media can be used to manipulate people with propaganda. They weren't talking about it as a "bad thing" but rather as a powerful tool that we needed to understand. In one of the class discussions it came out that I had not heard about 3 mile Island which was front page news (this was spring of 1979). This college was in Houston Texas. The teacher was stunned and couldn't believe I didn't have a TV and didn't watch the news.
So I said, OK, I am ignorant about 3 mile island, what is it that I should be doing right now because of it? The answer was nothing. There was nothing in the news that was a light to my path. Now granted that was probably one of the most important news stories in the US in the last 45 years. But whether you watched the nightly news, read about it in a magazine a month later, or read a history of it a few years later, did it really matter?
In the last 50 years I have had a working TV in my house for about ten years. At that time I tried watching the news but could not stomach all the commercials and the banality. I don't believe the nightly news is there to educate you, rather it is there to mesmerize you. All those people during the pandemic who acted like drones, they were mesmerized.