I'm beginning to think the news is really not that important. Even in the midst of a global pandemic when presumably the news would be crucial to explain how to keep you and your family safe it's not clear it helped given the noise level of the information published. At the crucial early stages, being informed (masks don't help! don't buy them: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don...) would have hurt you (whoops our bad: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...). Being largely uninformed and just getting the gist of information might have been fine.
When I go on vacation and stop checking the news for a week, i'm amazed at the volume of information I missed, how much I enjoyed not thinking about said information, and how unimportant it truly was in the grand scheme of my life.
Solves many privacy problems (but not all), avoids Dunbar number violations, and gives a genuine source of social attention (which humans need) from people who are more involved in your life. Getting enough social attention (and giving enough in turn) seems to calm a kind of anxiety that might otherwise suck people into social media.
For most people in most situations, I'd disagree strongly with "important" and definitely with "must".
I think you've nailed the reason why it's very difficult to completely cut your phone out of your life in terms of it being something you depend on in your routine. It's relatively easy to block social media and uninstall apps like Instagram but for me this was the use case that I hadn't been able to find a substitute for.
I build this service to deal with this specific problem, essentially allowing you to have news and other kinds of content (like blog posts) delivered to your Kindle to read in a newspaper format:
We're still in beta and I would love any feedback from HN readers. If you have any questions or feedback you can email me at the email in my bio.
What you can do is cut back on your digital socializing. Which means interacting with fewer people or less often. For me that comes naturally, but on days where I have even two people chatting with me routinely, it easily starts to eat into my attention for work and other things.
The trick is to avoid Facebook entirely, not have friends, and not have any followers on Twitter that are not bots.