Individual- and Country-Level Factors That Explain News Avoidance

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Ben Toff, whose interest is in news avoidance. Such avoidance is comparatively rare: some 7% of U.K. and U.S. news users acknowledge such practices as their default mode, and often explain them as a result of their news fatigue and exhaustion in the current political context.

There are a variety of individual as well as country-level explanations for this. Age, class, gender, and attitudinal reasons (trust in the news, strong ideological positions, perceptions of their own political efficacy) tend to be associated with news avoidance at the individual level; at a country level, the presence and role of public service media, the overall supply of news, and levels of press and political freedom in a country are also likely to play a role.

The present study drew on representative multi-country news use data from the 2017 Digital News Report to explore this, and correlated these with background data on the countries studied. Individual-level characteristics explained some news avoidance practices: younger people, women, strength of left-wing ideology, and uncertainty about personal ideology were associated with more news avoidance; strong right-wing ideology resulted in less news avoidance. Low levels of perceived political efficacy and media trust also led to more news avoidance.

Countries with higher levels of press freedom, and countries with higher levels of political freedom and stability showed less news avoidance; strong public service media and strong newspaper markets resulted in less news avoidance, while highly diverse media markets produced more news avoidance. Of all variables, press freedom stood out the most, however, and it appears from this that a lack of press freedom – which also reduces public trust in the news – is the most prominent driver of news avoidance.