As I recall, in those golden days of the media past, there were numerous studies that showed, both for TV and radio, news consumption was negatively correlated with knowledge of current events.
> Comparing my recollection of those days to what I see now in others, and to how well I feel I am personally informed on the current events of our times, the impression I get as that we were better informed back then.
The impression I get is that people probably felt better informed back then. But probably weren't.
OTOH, because there were fewer, more standard vehicles, and they were very much integrated into peoples daily lives, the false impression of being informed that people had was probably strongly reinforced because what was being delivered (whether actually informative or not) was a lot more consistent person to person.
My search was cursory (I was just surprised by your claim and checked it), but (a) the results appears to point in the opposite direction to your claim and (b) sort of misses the point of the 'tzs parent comment.
Here's how it worked a long time ago. We had three main ways we would get news (aside from person to person). There was television. There was radio. And there were newspapers and news magazines.
On television, there would be a morning news program, an evening news program, and a late night news program. The evening news was the most important. Watching this would often be an important part of a family's daily schedule. Eat dinner and then watch the news. Or watch the news and then serve dinner. Or watch the news while eating dinner.
There were also weekly news magazines on television, such as "60 Minutes", that would cover only 2 or 3 stories a week (sometimes only 1) but go into it in much more depth than the regular evening news could.
Back in those days, radio was one of our major sources of music. Every hour they would break for a few minutes of news. So if something important happened throughout the day, people would find out about it without having to wait for the evening news on TV.
For more in depth coverage of major stories, and for coverage of a broader range of stories than we got from TV or radio there was the newspapers and the news magazines. Every city but the smallest had at least one daily newspaper. Some cities had two or even more.
A very large fraction of the population subscribed to a newspaper. Many papers published both a morning edition and an evening edition, so you could choose which you wanted. Some only offered one, but another paper offered the other. Whichever you had, it would be a fixed part of your daily ritual.
I liked morning editions. That way I could stumble out of bed, groggily go retrieve my paper from in front of my door, somehow make my way to the bathroom, and then while sitting on the john look at the front page. If nothing was there that shocked me out of my lingering slumber, I'd turn to the comics pages and read them. I might have another go at the front page over breakfast.
Then in the evening there would be some reasonably fixed time when I'd sit down and read the news, the few sports results I might care about, and the non-news material like movie reviews, fluff pieces, and maybe have a go at the crossword puzzle.
This was typical. Most of us had some kind of habit that involved in us spending quality time with our newspaper every day.
Many also subscribed to a weekly news magazine, such as Time, Newsweek, or US News and World Reports. Reading this was often one of our comforting ritual events. These magazines were not as timely as our newspapers, but could go into a lot more detail.
The key here is that a large fraction of the population had integrated ingesting news into their lives in a habitual, ritualistic way, and in a way that minimized distractions from other sources. Kids knew not to disturb Dad when he's reading his Sunday paper, or to keep the noise down when Walter Cronkite is on.
Comparing my recollection of those days to what I see now in others, and to how well I feel I am personally informed on the current events of our times, the impression I get as that we were better informed back then.
We have many more sources of news now, but we find stories from aggregators like Google News, or from link sharing sites like here and Reddit, or from what we see on Facebook and Twitter. The serious news by dedicated journalists we find through such means is mixed with links to poorly researched blogs and to sites that hide opinion as news.
When we do find ourselves reading good solid news, it is not part of some time we've set aside for getting the news. It is something we came across while entertaining ourselves, and we'll easily be distracted away in a few minutes.
When I first got my Kindle, I tried trial subscriptions to the Kindle editions of the Seattle Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and I set aside "news time" each day to read them. I noticed an interesting thing. In discussion forums I participated in, I generally felt that the other participants and I were about equally well informed on the current events issues that came up in the forums. However, once I started reading newspapers, and reading them regularly, it seemed obvious that I was better informed than my forum mates.
I let the trials expire, because there were enough features missing from all three papers (no comics, no crosswords, no pictures) that it just did not seem that the time was right for newspapers on Kindle at the price they wanted. I noticed that I quickly reverted to feeling like my forum mates knew as much as I did.
I'm not saying we should dump internet as a source of news. Just that being well informed might require more than treating solid high quality news as something that can be sprinkled in among our cat videos and clever tweets to be stumbled upon as we flitter our limited attention spans from one thing to another.