News Curation and ‘News Finds Me’ Perceptions in China

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Xiaohao He, whose interest is in ‘news finds me’ perceptions and its relationship with news efficacy perceptions. She begins, unfortunately, by highlighting the now debunked concept of ‘echo chambers’, and points out that existing studies of this often neglect news consumption practices – not least, the process of passive news consumption where individuals do not actively seek news, but instead rely on peers and algorithms for their information. Individuals with higher levels of passivity in news engagement tend to be more likely to believe in disinformation and have lower level of political knowledge and participation.

This was studied through a survey of some 600 participants in China: from this, it emerges that people with more picky news selection behaviours and greater preferences for soft news select more homogeneous news content (falsely understood here as an ‘echo chamber’); perceptions of news overload also lead people to seek greater homogeneity in their news consumption. ‘News finds me’ perceptions mediate this; individuals with interests in ‘hard news’ are especially unlikely to hold such perceptions.

The main takeaway here is that individuals with greater active interest in hard news are more engaged in curating their information sources than people who believe that ness will simply find them and who are therefore not actively seeking out news. It is of course entirely incorrect to understand this as the creation of ‘echo chambers’, however…