The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is the great Renee Barnes, with a paper on strategic political news avoidance. This is a comparative study between Australia and Singapore, but the paper today is about the Australian side. Political news is of critical importance, yet information overload, issue fatigue, lack of media trust, emotional reactions to the news, a perception of low relevance and impact, and general indifference all contributing to news avoidance; there may also be a difference between intentional and unintentional news avoidance.
How do all these factors intersect with each other, then? What actually drives deliberate political news avoidance? The core framework here is individual foresight: in organisational communication, this is used to examine the future focus of employees in organisations. It evaluates whether employees intend to stay with an employer, or are looking to move on. This is also useful in the present context as it explores aspects related to the person, the process, and the outcomes.
Here, within the element of the person there is a focus on their experience, intuition, knowledge, and capabilities; for the process, how people learn and navigate information; for the outcomes, what specific behaviours and strategies they employ; and in the overall context, media-environmental factors and pressures are also considered.
The study explored this through nine focus groups of Australians aged 21-60 with variable news interests and demographics. Personal factors driving avoidance include a lack of understanding, knowledge and experience; emotional and intuitive reactions and (sometimes anticipatory) anxiety about the news, as well as gut feelings about trustworthiness; and individual skills and experiences including emotional intelligence and time management limitations.
Navigation strategies include social filtering, where family and friends become gatekeepers and curators of news information and communal sense-making processes are employed; strategic engagement through alternative pathways such as comedy shows, podcasts, and social media, as well as through a focus on local news and broader contexts; and future thinking about preserving mental health, considering the long-term impact, and deliberate planning of media engagement around major political events like elections.
Specific behaviours that arise from this include platform avoidance, gaming the platform recommendation algorithms, time management of news engagement, issue-based engagement, trust-based filtering of news sources, boundary setting for community discussions, alternative civic engagement, and prioritising wellbeing over full information.
The 24-hour news cycle in the media environment, extreme political polarisation, electoral exhaustion, scandal fatigue, disconnection from political actors, the primacy of economic over political concerns, the experience of health crises like COVID-19, and work/life balance and family responsibilities are all contextual factors to this.
Political news avoidance is therefore quite strategic as people employ and move in and out of these behaviours. Protective avoidance, selective engagement, social mediation, a trust-deficit cycle, and an overwhelm-retreat pattern all emerged as key strategies employed by participants across the study.
