not sure if this resonates with anyone else, but from my own experience (especially back when I had really bad anxiety) I think a major draw of news is the perceived feeling of safety from being "in the know". I believed that the more I knew about what was going on in the world, the safer I would be without necessarily taking action based on the information. I think it was as if not reading the news was like being in a dark room where my mind was free to conjure up a multitude of awful things/situation lurking in the dark, but by reading what was gong on and grounding those fears in something "real", it gave me the sense that the world was not so scary or I could at least better react/protect myself by "knowing"/"illuminating" the darkness.

Of course all this mostly just fed into my fears and just exacerbated my anxiety-induced hyper vigilance and paranoia, but I really think that there was a part of me that saw benefit in being aware of the state of the world through news (both mainstream and alternative).