> I wouldn't consider those to be matters affecting your life, career or business. They're really just interacting the news, like a hobby.
Knowing enough to vote sensibly is a duty of a citizen. It has a direct impact on everybody’s life in a more or less diffuse way, and for many people it is a matter of life and death. You’re right though that the direct benefit to an individual’s life is on average not significant, in most cases the time could be more profitably spent on developing yourself or those around you. Although that assumes that everyone else does their duty and maintains a reasonable political environment for those opting out to live in. It’s a tragedy of the commons, individuals acting purely in their interests will over time destroy the common space, unless we impose on ourselves and others a duty to maintain it.
If your aim is to vote responsibly, then the news is a poor place to get information to help you decide. Not just because of the obvious political biases, but choice of stories they lead you to believe are important. Sex scandals, he-said-she-saids, or some crime that gets all the attention for weeks while numerous other similar crimes are ignored. A lot of really unimportant gossip magazine type stories that have little to do with reality other than being cherry-picked from it. The news does a poor job of reporting honestly on dry boring information that has significant impact. Instead, it picks stories that it presents as important but in fact are chosen because they're engaging. An obvious example is the over-reporting of terrorism compared to car accidents. People vote on terrorism because the TV told them it's important and didn't say much about something boring like bad marriages or poor risk evaluation skills that silently ruin people's lives on a massive scale.
You can use Wikipedia instead. Look up wars, statistics about crime, cost of living, a law that you've been affected by, or whatever is important to you, as decided by you, not pushed into your head by the news. There are enough people voting according to what the TV told them is important that you're not really making things better by adding yourself to their ranks.
Knowing enough to vote sensibly is a duty of a citizen. It has a direct impact on everybody’s life in a more or less diffuse way, and for many people it is a matter of life and death. You’re right though that the direct benefit to an individual’s life is on average not significant, in most cases the time could be more profitably spent on developing yourself or those around you. Although that assumes that everyone else does their duty and maintains a reasonable political environment for those opting out to live in. It’s a tragedy of the commons, individuals acting purely in their interests will over time destroy the common space, unless we impose on ourselves and others a duty to maintain it.