If roughly 40 percent of Americans avoid the news, what does that mean for political engagement?
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There’s no doubt we’re living in polarizing times. But a large swath of Americans are less polarized than the headlines would suggest. That’s because about 40 percent sometimes or often avoid the news, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
University of Minnesota Journalism Professor Benjamin Toff has been looking into this issue and is coauthor of “Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism.”
“Part of it is about how negative the news is, how anxiety producing it can be, how upsetting it can be,” Toff said. “For others it’s about feeling confused by it. It’s really hard to make sense of. There’s a lot of jargon.”
But those are just a few factors driving news avoidance, according to Toff. It’s a complicated phenomenon, and so are its effects on society.
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Disinterest in news is connected to disinterest in politics
Toff’s research suggests a deep interest in politics is connected to news consumption. People who feel disconnected to the political process or turned off by political vitriol are far less likely to regularly read, watch or listen to the news.
“They struggle to see how any of this matters [and] how it actually connects to the things that they care about closer to home.”
As Toff and his fellow researchers interviewed people in the U.S., U.K. and Spain for their book, they regularly asked what political party the interviewees identified with and how they placed themselves in the left/right ideological spectrum.
“And on those questions, people often stumbled, and they actually would stop and ask us for clarification,” Toff said. “They said these were things that they often struggled with themselves to make sense of, when they tried to engage politically.”
Toff said this leads to a chicken and egg situation. Does not paying attention to news drive people’s dislike of politics, because they don’t understand it? Or does their lack of interest in politics drive people away from news?
“We think probably both of these things are going on reinforcing each other,” said Toff.
News organizations aren’t doing much to bring those Americans into the fold. More and more, Toff said, political coverage is targeted toward niche, highly engaged audiences who are already consuming lots of news.
“As news organizations have struggled to maintain connections with the audiences they have, they're very focused on the audience analytics data they have who's consuming their content.”
News avoiders can feel ‘trapped in the middle’
While political polarization exists everywhere, Toff said that interviews he conducted in the U.S. stand out. Here, people say they avoid news to avoid uncomfortable arguments about politics.
“They had people in their lives who are very opinionated on one side or the other, whether it’s people that they worked with or whether it's a family member,” he said. “They felt sort of trapped in the middle of it and had a hard time making sense of the information they were hearing.”
When news avoiders check out, more polarized voices get amplified
Toff said that his research suggests that people disengage with news because it’s confusing and upsetting. When nearly half of Americans fall into this group, they’re less likely to engage in the political process, creating a vacuum for the most passionate — and polarized — to dominate the polls and the conversation.
“So much of what we focus on is just how divided the country is,” he said. “Actually, much of the country is more of the people who are uninterested in any of that than the people who are really polarized on one side or the other.”
And it’s the loudest voices that the media tends to focus on, he said.
Taking a news break is OK, too
The way news is presented, particularly on social media, makes it hard to escape, said Toff.
Most people want to learn what they need to know, but have other things going on in their lives.
“Over time, [news consumption] can accumulate in a way that can affect people’s mental health.”
That’s why Toff says it’s valuable for people to take a break from news. In fact, selective news avoidance rates have been going up, he said.
“It can be really valuable to build in habits that allow for taking a step back, taking breaks from news,” said Toff. “A lot of people feel like it’s increasingly necessary to be a sort of healthy consumer of news and information in the world that we live in today.”