That's not really true. If anything, it's the opposite. There weren't professional sports, or movies, or television to distract them. For daily entertainment, there was basically card-playing and reading the newspaper (and magazines and books, of course).

The newspapers in the U.S. in the 18th and 19th century were usually only 4-8 pages long and at least half of their newsprint was dedicated to political coverage every day. The other half was split between non-politiical current events--local, national, and international. A page or two would usually also be dedicated to ads.

Newspapers regularly printed whole speeches given on the floor of Congress. The President's annual State of the Union Address was read in the newspaper, not heard. The newspaper editors would regularly preface their coverage with editorials on their thoughts on whatever issue they were reporting on that day. With no other window to the outside world, any given household (with its two parents and ten kids) would devour the newspaper daily from beginning to end, sometimes reading it to each other, but at least summarizing the important events to each other.

Historians of the Civil War often comment about how incredibly informed the soldiers and other letter-writers of the time were about the minutiae of politics, both in the decades leading up to the war as well as during the war itself. People gobbled up all the info and were way more informed than they are now.

Of course, newspaper editors could be biased, much like cable news networks are today. But even small towns back then had multiple papers, each with a different political slant, so people would usually pick the paper they preferred. Among urbanites, they often consumed more than one newspaper a day with opposing or at least differing viewpoints. They'd read the morning paper on the way to work and the evening paper when they got home.