Normally in English you have to use "are" when referring to a plural item. News is a singular noun which represents a plural idea. Other words like this are audience or family Here, we treat news as a singular noun and say "What is the news?" or "What's the news?". Hope this helped :)

"News" is a singular noun, and it ALWAYS take a singular verb and pronoun to agree with it. Below, Rahman pointed out some other words that are similar, except "ethics" does not really belong on that list. "Economics" and "Ethics" are singular as academic subjects, but in their general meaning they are plural.

"what are the news" is wrong sentence. news,mathematics,physics, ethics etc are the words which do represent singular auxiliary verb..... here your suggested reading is "subject-verb" agreement .... have all the luck