Partial Picture

The difficulty with staying informed isn't that the news media is necessarily untrustworthy, it's that its coverage of the world is necessarily incomplete, and editorial decisions, even when they can be inferred, are not transparent. And this is to be expected. After all, there's no independent source that one can consult that has an exhaustive list of every event, person or circumstance that may be newsworthy. So there's nothing to compare to.

Typical media incentives tend to push stories towards the more sensational, but something can be sensational without being either informative or actionable. But this is the nature of free (and even some paid) news sites. While one could say that this is due to the fact that their main customers are their advertisers, rather than their readers, advertisers don't have a big interest in story selection; they want stories that will attract the most eyeballs. And that means that news sites, as a business, are searching for the largest common denominator. The mass market, unsurprisingly, seeks to cater to the greatest mass of people.

And so what it really comes down to is my own perception of myself as an outlier when it comes to the news, based on the fact that I don't find the stories presented to be particularly useful most of the time. They can be interesting, and somewhat diverting, but they often strike me as being more entertaining than particularly informative. But, again, not having a worldwide index of everything that's going on at my fingertips, I couldn't say whether the coverage as I encounter it is representative or not. I simply have the impression that I'm outside the target demographic for it.