I mean it's really up to you but I disagree with this. Reading the news enables you to have an understanding of current world issues and become a contributing member of society. I'm not sure where you live, but I feel like in the Silicon Valley there is pretty large bubble where people are so focused on building a startup they forget how thousands of children are being gassed in Syria. I believe that reading the news can give you perspective on the world and life.
Just my $0.02. Don't have to agree just my thoughts.
There's a big difference between reading the news every day, reading the news every week, and reading the news every month.
I used the read the news every day (and reading news magazines weekly); what ended up happening is that I also ended up reading through a lot of fluff and reading about a lot of inconsequential mere-fact-stating news. Even if you read the news every week, there's a ton of repeated analysis that you have to filter out. I ended up realizing that this was a legitimate waste of time.
Now I just read the news maybe every month. I'll usually only read long-form synthesis/analysis articles, rather than the kind of stuff that comes in through AP/Reuters. The exception being news articles coming in through HN, of course.
Going back to your analogy, while I'll keep myself updated on the major movements in the civil war in Syria, what I don't need to read about is how 12 people died in a bomb blast on Tuesday in <city> or something extremely-low-level like that.
Just my $0.02. Don't have to agree just my thoughts.