When I turn off the news and just get outside and in the company of strangers, I get a much more uplifted view of humanity.
In that, it's addictive, and/but not useful nor efficient nor representative of humanity state and progress (of which you get a broader perspective when you get to meet different people everyday).
In that perspective, skipping the news is not so much burying the head in the sand, rather the opposite.
It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.
...if less in some of the systems we live under
People put those systems we live under in place, and, importantly, people continue, even go out of their way, to keep these systems in place. It's not enough to simply recognize that issues are systemic. Good people would actually do something to address them.