Vide "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews (news as an overvalued distraction) and recent "The Welfare Effects of Social Media" http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf (on average, quitting Facebook makes one a bit happier... and much less up-to-date with news; maybe it is not just an irrelevant correlation).