You seem to believe that not following the news leads to ignorance?

My question to you is - Is following the news even a form of participation?

I would argue that news has an incredibly high noise to signal ratio. Most news anchors and talking heads and commentators talk a lot but convey very little. It's obvious they understand very little and ultimately focus on regurgitating what is "commonly understood" that everyone else also repeats. Plus usually there's heavy biases involved - so many implicit assumptions every time they open their mouth. Hardly any nuance is conveyed.

Anyways let's forget news for a second and discuss how to make some kind of impact, some kind of change.

To my mind at least 3 options occur to me:

1. Writing. Don't write to a wide audience, write to a narrow one. Really get in deep on a political issue.

2. Start local. Participate in town council, or similar, get involved as an active member in local politics to gain practice/exposure. Don't need to be a politician or be elected yet.

3. Or my favorite - focus on some technical solution for helping people to organize perhaps..

I mean I don't watch traditional news and more youtube from genuine indpendent journalists who are transparent about their reporting and even their company in general. (Tldr news) etc. and I am way more focused on the economy side of things.

I do watch a lot of atrioc and I think that he's a decent enough source to be trusted compared to journalists in the sense that I get both fun and news at the same time but yeah.

Like I said (I think) I am way more interested on things financially and so plain bagel who I consider to be an excellent finance youtuber who isn't a grifter and literally has no incentives to sell you a course or something. ( crazy that I feel like I have to mention it, that's how scummy most finance youtubers are)

Even then, even such amount of news which I consider to be a signal makes me depressed. I may have a left leaning bias but that's because of the incompetence of the govt. and I am not even an american but its interesting to watch american politics because it impacts us all and my countries politics is a shit hole that its not worth watching, both parties suck, (tbh america is same, bernie is the only person that I trust for the most part imo)

My point that I was trying to make is that maybe mass scale of people depress me with what is happening in the world. I wish to be ignorant but I wish to know if that makes sense.

Regarding 3rd point, to me 3) is also my favourite as I love finding technical solutions to organize/build etc., yet I find it that I am not an effective oranizer for stuff, maybe I am better off just helping non profits in their mission that might align with my political beliefs, but I wonder if I can do it without it being my full job or taking full time efforts. Like, decentralizing the communications by moving to matrix or helping them in self hosting their stuff comes to my mind. Does this make sense? Do non profits need this?