Sometimes, sort of. If you think about the things you read on the news, you'll notice that 99%+ ends up being of no consequence for anything. A lot of what people get outraged about daily is total bullshit, and it gets forgotten the very next day, but even the more important-seeming issues really average out to zero impact on the community. In terms of information, the news is a channel with absurdly low signal/noise ratio. If you want to positively impact people, your first job should be finding a channel with higher SNR.

There's a secondary value to news (or rather primary, in terms of value delivered) - social objects. Most people know what's currently on the news, so even though the raw information value is near-zero, it becomes a great conversation starter.