Why do people actively avoid the news?

You don’t have to be a journalist running into the warm embrace of a holiday to know that, sometimes, it is hard to avoid the news. The news follows us to the airport, it boards the aircraft with us, then it digs into our melted brains via lamentably good poolside wifi connections. The news is airborne.

According to the Reuters Digital News Report, published on the crest of the June heatwave, 41 per cent of Irish consumers say they never actively avoid the news. Good for them. That does, however, mean that 59 per cent are familiar with the concept of putting their head in the sand, if only temporarily.

In 2017, declarations of news avoidance – like the social media detoxes on which they depend – are fashionable even among the highly politically engaged. The most voracious consumers of headlines have been seen to announce, with regret, that they have hit the news wall and will now impose a news blackout on themselves, sometimes lasting as long as one whole evening.

These are clearly news addicts suffering the after-effects of a binge. But now, thanks to the Reuters report, we have a fuller sense of the reasons people strive to avoid the news. Yes, they want to make their lives great again.

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Effect on mood

According to research by Dublin City University’s Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) for the Irish part of this global study, the top reason chosen by 53 per cent of people who said they avoided the news often, sometimes or occasionally was that “news has a negative effect on my mood”.

This came in some way ahead of the helpless, despairing “I don’t feel there is anything I can do about it”, which was cited by 28 per cent, and the scary “I cannot rely on the news to be true”, picked by 24 per cent.

The fourth most common reason, “graphic news images are upsetting”, chosen by 20 per cent, recalls the first.

The news can be deeply triggering for some, and this may be as much a result of their personalities, mental health and what is happening in their everyday lives as it is a function of the utter horror of the news in question.

Further down the list there are two pragmatic, life-management reasons, “news interrupts my concentration” (cited by 15 per cent) and “news is too time consuming” (chosen by 12 per cent). Welcome to the age of news bombardment by mobile.

Then there’s the curious “news leads to arguments I’d rather avoid”, which 10 per cent of news dodgers cited as their motivation for switching off.

Political persuasion

The US version of the Reuters Digital News Report broke down reasons for news avoidance further by self-identified political persuasion, revealing that “negative effect on mood” was more likely to be cited by people on the left than those who said they were right or centrist, while “I can’t rely on the news to be true” was a far more common reason to avoid the news for right-wingers than it was for centrists and left-wingers.

I feel like the spectre of "BrexiTrump" hangs over pretty much every paragraph, but here lies a conundrum. There may be any number of unpleasant news themes that become our personal Kryptonite, but it doesn't follow that we want the media to stop reporting on them. Sometimes what we want is for the media to carry on (or start) speaking truth to power, but somewhere over there, somewhere far away, while we watch Game of Thrones.

Reassuringly for journalists, the proportion of Irish people who told the Reuters Digital News Report researchers that they “often” avoided the news was much lower than those who said they “sometimes” or “occasionally” did. Indeed, the proportion who rejected the news “often” was never higher than 7 per cent among any age group (high fives to the 25-34-year-olds for coming out top for this answer).

A tendency to avoid the news is higher among younger age groups than older ones: only 27 per cent of 18-24-year-olds said they never avoided the news, while 54 per cent of people aged 55-plus said they never did. (They’re big Bryan Dobson fans.) Elsewhere in the study, although willingness to pay for online news was highest among 25-34-year-olds, other findings confirm that interest in news tends to increase with age.

This is where we get to the nitty-gritty for news organisations. Attempts to maximise the attention of “casual users”, often through what used to be known as “and finally. . .” stories, can smack of a cutesy desperation that bemuses or even alienates the “news lovers” who are already on board.

On the other hand, for news brands to simply assume that younger news refuseniks will automatically “mature” into heavier news consumers is the hallmark of complacency and always has been.

One of these decades, a generation may come along and say they tried the news, didn’t like the casting much, couldn’t relate to any of the characters and thought the storylines highly improbable, so they didn’t make it to the end of the first season. And then there won’t be any news left to avoid.