Relations between News Avoidance and Conspiracist Beliefs

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Dominika Betakova, whose interest is in news avoidance – a growing pattern around the world. Such news avoidance is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, though: it may be intentional, or may simply represent a low level of news consumption – and the people who engage in one or the other practice are not necessarily the same.

Intentional news avoidance may be temporal (e.g. during the COVID-19 pandemic), and can lead to better mental health; it can also be related to greater adherence to misbeliefs, a lack of political knowledge, and less political participation, and people with low news consumption can also be more susceptible to conspiracy beliefs including anti-vaccination attitudes.

This project examined these patterns for Austria, using two waves of a national survey in October 2022 (just after a proposed mandatory vaccination law was scrapped in response to popular protests) and February 2024. It distinguished four groups for analysis: intentional news avoiders, news consumers who also avoid news, non-avoiders who consume no news, and non-avoiding news consumers. It also tested for conspiracist beliefs and pro- or anti-vaccination attitudes.

Age, education, socioeconomic status, and higher intentional news avoidance all predicted conspiracy beliefs. Intentional news avoiders and news consumers who also avoid news had higher conspiracist beliefs; intentional news avoiders and high news consumers both had higher anti-vaccination beliefs.

Overall, then, intentional news avoidance is related to higher conspiracist beliefs and anti-vaccination attitudes; high news consumption (consuming whatever such people understood as ‘news’) also led to higher anti-vaccination attitudes. Political ideology should also be examined in further research, however, as it might also play an important role.