While I do agree it's important to know the news, I think it's also important to take them with a grain of salt. The key thing is, you have to be able to spot what is propaganda and what is actual news.
As a benign example, if you have a local event (like an artisan fair or some such), it's ALWAYS going to be a huge success. Numbers are going to be way inflated, or twisted into some half-truth. You might have gone yourself and seen that there might have been very few merchants (and even less potential customers), but it'll be qualified of a grand success.
Or things like a local archery tournament, where you have 22 people that got medals for getting position 1-3 in their category... And then if you dig further you see that there's 22 members total and that they invented categories so that it looks like it was an amazing accomplishment on their part (and get funding so that we support the great archery team).
These kind of things are pretty benign, but unfortunately news tend to be extrapolated the exact same way for major events. So I do keep with the news but with an healthy dose of skepticism :)