I don't think your point is at odds with the OP. Even though the OP essentially advocates cutting out all new sources from your life at the end of the article, the real point of the article is to disabuse you of the illusion that these news sources are contributing to your productivity. So, if you want to keep up with the news so you can participate in water cooler discussions and build your social network[1], that's fine. But if you are spending large fractions of your time reading news because you think it will somehow improve your productivity, or even make you more informed, you're fooling yourself.

[1] I mean your actual social network, in the sense we all used that term before Facebook came along.