You don't realize how completely filled with nonsense the American news is until you step away for a bit. It's clearly an entertainment mechanism, made real by claiming to describe some sort of reality supervenient over day-to-day life (and in that it perhaps has some predecessors). But like all forms of entertainment, it serves the function of legein, preserving the possibility of discourse, a range of things to be talked about and held in the mind, or perhaps combined and sifted through like some sort of Baconian cipher. Heid suggested that newspapers were the modern form of legein. Occasionally, they're rather up-front about it: "here's what to know/talk about."
A genuinely phenomenological description of what the news is might be interesting. It's a rather stark claim. "The things that I will read to you over the next thirty minutes (taking the 6PM news as a paradigm case) describe the fundamental condition of the world." Or perhaps only the recent changes.
And yet, once the actual impact is attenuated, if I'm certain that nothing said (outside the weather report) will predict anything that will happen to me in the near future, describing the changes without describing the general condition seems a stretch. I would learn more by reading a history book than listening to five minutes of nuanced discussion about current events.
So, like many forms of entertainment, perhaps it's not about knowing things. Or even speaking about them.