Consider that maybe them ingesting news from the President and other "news sources" are the reason they think this. Not because they are ignoring the world. If they ignored the world around them, they wouldn't have an opinion at all.

So in that case, how good is the consumption of information?

This is a lot like people saying that the people from thousands of years ago thought the world was flat. Then there is a rebuttal saying "no, Eratosthenes proved it was round forever ago, people knew that." The reality is people didn't think about if the world was round or not and it had zero impact on their life and vice versa.

People consume so much news information thinking it makes them a good citizen or something. But our power to change what happens 7000 miles away is basically nil; the power to change the lives of people within 7 miles of you is massive. And if we all did that... the people 7000 miles away would probably get a lot better results than us whining and wringing our hands about it while hoping politicians did something.

The problem in '03 wasn't that people were reading too much, it was that they had no idea what was going on. The more you read, the more news from the President becomes contextualized, and you can have a more nuanced opinion on it. If the President says "Iraq bad" and you don't know anything about Iraq, it's hard to go "well, actually, it's a little more complicated than that."

Edit: I have a masters in international affairs. But, when I want to talk international affairs, the person I call up is my buddy with a high-school diploma, not people from my cohort. My less-formally-educated friend reads widely, and has a much more grounded take on everything going on around us that sometimes makes me stop and rethink my own opinions. The power of reading widely and often is pretty spectacular in my opinion, and can sometimes trump a formal education in a subject.

My argument is that people have vanishingly little power as-is anyway, as evidenced by both executive and legislative branches ignoring the popular sentiments and securing their power first and foremost. In which case, time spent in that area is an absurdly low ROI compared to just helping your neighbors with the groceries, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, or stocking your Little Free Libraries/Pantries near you, rather than worrying what is happening in Tibet.

I disagree in that I believe that states and localities can be an agent of broader change. Sure, the feds won't reform drug laws, but locally our states and localities are simply working around the feds! So we should know what's wrong in a broad sense to push our localities in the right direction. And I believe in keeping tabs on the feds so if we get a chance to nudge them in the right direction, we can.

Despite disagreeing with you on that point, I think you are 100% right, and if we were all acting locally to make the world a better place....well, it probably would be.

> people didn't think about if the world was round or not

As someone who once spent 2 hours bored on a boat, I do not find this credible.

As a user researcher, I'm really curious on how you think about what matters/what doesn't matter in terms of your news consumption. Obviously, there is a near infinite amount of things that happen every day/week/month/year/decade, but we all have a very finite amount of attention we can give to all of the information & potential news.

What issues/information/stories do you think matter? Is there a strong correlation between what you think matters and what NYT, WaPo, etc. are producing? Did you independently come up with the topics that most matter and then you track news on them, or you decide what matters after consuming news on the news sites?

It's more difficult when reporting is on things that are a little more fluffy. Claims a politician did something are almost impossible to verify and reporting on this ends up being an exercise in spin. One of the best things about politicians taking to twitter to directly communicate is that you have an unfiltered direct message. If something is in a tweet from a politician then you can be pretty sure that is the message they want to get out. If they same something stupid or ill considered at least you can judge them on that, not so much the actual facts of the content.

So media of all types allow you to judge the messenger, less so the message.

It’s worse to read the news and think yourself informed than to be ignorant and know it.

The only computer person I've ever met who was confident he knew everything there was to know about computers had never strayed outside building desktops.

The more you know about something, generally the more you recognize how much more there is to it that you don't know. A first-year medical student almost certainly is more keenly aware of how complex open-heart surgery is than someone whose knowledge is limited to watching it on Scrubs.

Someone who is ignorant and understands what not knowing something means eschews sound bite politics and any other simplifications due to all of the biases that come with any reduction.