To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"
Something like that, but with fewer binaries/absolutes.
Does it 'matter'? Sure. But less so than in the past, given that we live in an era where we have more access to vast quantities of global information than at any time in human history.
How we process and filter that information overload and awful signal-to-noise ratio is the critical question.
In my experience, "do your own research!" does not work. Some of us can do it for one or two topics that we are interested in and relate to our expertise, contacts, and experience, but nobody with responsibilities can do it for every topic that might be relevant. And even then, nobody can both attend the Tuesday night city council meeting and see if the hospital emergency room was really overflowing that same night. So a long time ago, we started to hire teams of professionals to do the investigating and the summarizing, grouped them into a few news sources, and interacted with that for most of the topics relevant to us. Humans are pretty good at understanding the strengths and weakneses of a handful of sources we have known for a long time. We are not good at sorting through thousands of disconnected claims from people and sources we don't know well, and we obviously can't process things in languages we don't know or from cultures we are not familiar with. Especially since its so easy to just plain make things up across a keyboard or in selected and edited photos and video. It is easier emotionally, and its easier because if you control the camera angle you can control what people see. And most importantly, I do not know of any Canadian media organization whose reporters pass on facts about events in other countries which would let anyone understand them in a sophisticated way.
Every good information system which I know creates strong barriers to inserting information into the stream of information-to-consider. They don't rely on filtering the BS for a lump of gold (or rather, any people who do that create summaries and surveys which are exepnsive to insert into the information steam but then get very close attention). If you listen to the open-source intelligence analysts who retired recently, they explain how much time and expertise it takes to sort information out of social media.
Remember that time and concentration are the ultimate scarce resources. Any time you say that people should pay more attention to something, you have to have a plausible answer to "what should they spend less time and attention on?" And it had better not be "they should spend more time on things I find fun and important, and less on things I find boring and unimportant."
Writing this reply cost 2 or 3 hours of concentration.
Another issue has been showed clearly by the UK-American response to COVID-19. After the arrival of vaccines, these governments and their fellow travellers
rejected the concept of public health, and focused on information control to convince people that they were safe and the government was handling the pandemic. And they had massive powers of information control, because who decides whether to measure the number of people who test positive, the amount of COVID in sewage, or the air quality in schools? The government. So they launched a concerted and mostly successful not to collect the data which could show that their vaccines-only strategy was failing. The rest of us can use what evidence is available, but we can't argue from data that is never collected.
