My thinking here is that I don’t need to pay attention to the news. When something happens that I should know of it’ll find its way into my awareness one way or another. I don’t need to go looking for it. If by ignoring the news I manage to avoid hearing about something entirely then it wasn’t important to begin with.
Personally I only go to one news site few times a day and I just scroll past most of it. On social media I block almost all of it, especially relating to politics. I’m still able to discuss current events with people and the topics that I cant, for example what some individual politican has said or did I’m not interested to discuss anyway.