New Data on News Avoidance in Aotearoa

The final session at ANZCA 2023 that I’m attending starts with Alex Beattie, whose interest is in news avoidance in Aotearoa. This usually refers to intentional news avoidance, but it is not always clear just how intentional such avoidance is; broader media platform choices might also have an impact on whether and how people see the news, for instance.

According to recent surveys, New Zealand has some of the highest levels of news avoidance in the world; some studies also suggest that this avoidance here and elsewhere might be a wellbeing practice. The present study explores what motivations New Zealanders have for avoiding the news, by using a representative survey in February 2022 that had some 1,200 respondents aged 18 and older; it also paid particular attention to the ethnicity of respondents, working in collaboration with Māori researchers.

Once again, this survey found news avoidance to be very prevalent in Aotearoa; 31.5% of respondents avoided the news sometimes, 16.9% often, and 11.7% always. Why this avoidance is so high still requires further investigation, however. Women avoided the news more frequently than men, possibly out of a perception that the news was predominantly made for men. Respondents avoided the news more often (60%) than the Internet (48%), interestingly.

People with far-right or far-left beliefs were especially likely to avoid the news; this might well be a result of their views being featured less favourably in coverage. General reasons for news avoidance are negative effects on respondents’ mood (especially for women and far-right partisans), the perceived untrustworthiness of the news (especially for right-wing or far-right individuals), prevailing sensationalism (especially for older audiences), or a lack of time (especially for younger audiences).

The types of news being avoided here were especially COVID-19 news (particularly for young people), crisis news (for Pākehā audiences), politics, and climate change stories (for older audiences, and for right-wing and far-right audiences).

This cements the overall view of high rates of news avoidance in New Zealand, and provides some more detailed, intersecting factors that drive such news avoidance for different audiences.