Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.
I don't know if it's just getting older or some deeper change in society, but more and more the reading of how my peers view the world depresses me. Even beyond the specific issues with prediction markets, there is a whole lot more to understanding our world than merely knowing the rough odds of possible outcomes.
Prediction markets miss all the experts, whether academic or laypeople wonks, who simply don't care to have a financial stake in the decision. I can't imagine how it'd be representative. In any case, the people weighing in are getting their information from somewhere and it's not thin air. How can you understand an issue without knowing motivations/vested interests from all sides, history leading up, etc?