I don’t use facebook and I didn’t even know that stephen hawking died before someone texted it to me.

Same with that famous pastor who died last month.

same with the bridge that collapsed in Miami near Florida International University.

The thing about it is, I don’t watch the news much already. I lost all respect for the news during the election when they would literally spend a week covering some sensational / gossip topic. It’s not news it’s entertainment with the occasional coverage of actual news topics. So without social media beaming every trendy headline into my eyes the moment I log in, I am ignorant to a lot of depressing stuff. Someone has to go out of their way to text it to me or I probably won’t see it. And that’s fine by me. (Yet somehow Tomi Lahren still finds a way to make it onto my SMS conversations -_-.)

In any case, aside from the depressing sensational media, facebook is also toxic because it can make you compare every aspect of your complicated life to other peoples’ highlight reels.

That's a pretty good argument for never turning on local news. It's garbage, just the video version of clickbait "journalism" in most cases.

(There is some good investigative journalism still being done on TV, but it's overwhelmed by "gotcha" stories and naked if-it-bleeds-it-leads sensationalism.)