Distinguishing Political from General News Avoidance

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Caroline Fisher and Renee Barnes, whose interest is in news avoidance. They begin by noting the global rise in news avoidance in recent years (not least following the COVID-19 pandemic), and this raises considerable concerns for democratic engagement in society.

But not all news avoidance is equal: avoiding sports news, for instance, has a significantly less substantial impact on democratic functions than avoiding political news. Political journalism, which centrally addresses journalism’s watchdog role, is considerably more important in this context, but its frequent use of jargon as well as its focus on conflict and negativity tends to put audiences off.

News avoidance also has various different flavours: some people avoid news altogether, while some avoid specific areas of news coverage. The present study explored this through a pilot online panel study with nearly 400 mostly young, educated, and left-leaning respondents, querying their news interest and news engagement or avoidance approaches; this found that news avoidance was strongly associated with political news avoidance, in particular.

Key reasons for this were negative affects on mood, lack of trust, overwhelm, lack of personal efficacy, exposure to unwanted conflict and arguments, etc.; personal involvement in politics (that is, the personal value and relevance of politics) was a stronger predictor of avoidance than overall feelings of political efficacy here. This study now needs to be extended to capture a broader range of the population.