I'd encourage you to read the quote, it's incredibly insightful. If you'd like cliff notes in our world of 140 characters - the news is largely irrelevant. The details, if not inconsequential, are largely unreliable. By contrast the big picture of events that truly matters will get to you whether you read the news or not.

To take a safe and neutral example, consider quantum computing. It's obtained a vast amount of headlines that consume substantial time and mental energy to assimilate. Yet years after those headlines? The largest number we've factorized using "pure" quantum computing (as opposed to drastically reducing the search space using tricks like cherry picking numbers optimized for rapid solving by Fermat factorization) is 21. Yes, 7 * 3. All of the mental energy, interest, excitement, and general 'consumption' one might have dedicated to quantum computing over the past has largely been a waste of time, energy, effort, and interest.

In cases where people become much more emotionally or mentally invested in the news, it's largely just quite sad. Even more so because the news regularly works to manipulate and exploit people's emotions, as in the case of Sicknick. And they're quite good at it!

Ciao (chow is what you eat).