So who are the consistent news avoiders?
Most news avoiders we interviewed were Sofía’s age or slightly older: young adults in their twenties or thirties. Research has long shown that age is intertwined with rates of news consumption: simply put, people tend to consume more news as they get older. In our U.S. survey data, the average age of news lovers was nearly two age brackets higher than news avoiders, almost a twenty-year difference. We find a similar dynamic internationally. In all but one of the markets covered in the Digital News Report 2022, rates of consistent news avoidance were higher among younger groups, including the three countries that are the focus of this study.
So why are young people more likely to avoid news consistently than older people? The example of Sofía illustrates a few key points. For one, she had trouble relating to the topics that she saw in the news (way too much politics, for instance), and she thinks that inability to relate may have to do with her stage of life. She conceded that she had plenty of free time, but right now following news was just not a top priority. Indeed, some research finds that even when young people see news use modeled by their parents at home, there is often a lag before they adopt news consumption habits in later adulthood.
Among the news avoiders we interviewed who were just a bit older than Sofia, we saw evidence that interests and preferences related to news can indeed grow and change as people get older. Take Bruce (United States), a thirty-something parent of young kids. Bruce explained that he had recently begun to pay closer attention to news and politics, which he largely attributed to getting older. As he put it, once he “started paying taxes,” he began to think, “Hey, this stuff really affects me.”
And yet, as was the case for Bruce, just as priorities start to shift, young adults may find they have less time than ever to consume news. Their interest grows right when their free time evaporates. Many young parents like Bruce feel that the daily demands of caretaking responsibilities and full-time work leave little time available for news, even as they start to see the appeal and value of it in ways that Sofia clearly did not—at least not yet.
Indeed, on the other end of the spectrum, we have retirees, who tend to be more interested in news and have more time for it. This was especially clear to us when interviewing news lovers in Iowa, many of whom were in their fifties or sixties or older. Many were no longer working full-time, and their children were grown. They spent a significant number of hours each day consuming news, and it was clear they not only had time for it but also used it to structure their days. They described the television programs they watched at specific times and the repertoires of websites or apps they visited habitually. Indeed, when we asked news avoiders why they thought some people devoted so much more time and attention to news, many thought it ultimately came down to time: news lovers just had way more of it, in part due to their age and stage of life. Avoiders saw time spent with news as a luxury; some people just had “nothing better to do,” as Joyce (United States) put it. Of course, this phenomenon is also heavily shaped by socioeconomic class, as we discuss further later.
As we also see in Sofía’s case, some reasons young people are more likely to consistently avoid news are less related to news content and more tied to the digital environment in which they encounter news. These kinds of factors are closely related to what we refer to in this book as “infrastructures” and what earlier research called the “texto-materialistic” reasons why some people avoid news—that is, characteristics related to the material form and delivery of news that some people find off-putting.5 Whereas older people, like many of the news lovers we interviewed, may have great affection for traditional forms of news, such as newsprint and broadcast news with their authoritative anchors intoning the events of the day, younger people who have grown up consuming most of their information digitally, much of it via mobile phones and social media, often feel no such attachments. Sofía at one point recalled a time when, encouraged by her parents, she tried to pay closer attention to news by reading it on her phone. (Newsprint was messy and impractical, so she did not even consider it.) But the experiment had been short-lived because even on her phone she found the format—small print, long stories—so awkward. Meanwhile, the television news that her mother watched seemed old-fashioned, slow, and tedious. She wondered how the TV news anchors did not die of boredom.
We found that the digital natives we interviewed, perhaps even more than being actively turned off by the form or content of news, felt they did not need to dedicate time specifically to consuming news from a news source because they would see it on social media anyway. Academics who study digital communication have taken to calling this phenomenon the “news finds me” perception: the assumption that one need not seek news out because all the news that is really worth knowing will simply land on one’s digital doorstep. Although this assumption is not unique to young people, they spend more time on social media, and more of them report social media as their main source of news, so they are more likely to have this belief continually reaffirmed.
Young news avoiders like Sofía are also highly aware of a diverse array of other forms of media that are competing for their attention. These media include streaming services, social media, and messaging apps, which many interviewees, including Sofía, described as important parts of their media diets. Scholars have argued for years that as media options expand, people who were never particularly interested in news will consume less of it because they now simply have more access to more appealing fare. Although this expansion of media choices applies to people of all ages, young people tend to have greater facility with and exposure to the contemporary media landscape and all of its wide-ranging, attention-grabbing offerings. In combination with the various other reasons young people may be less attracted to traditional forms of news, described earlier, the vast array of alternatives may be especially likely to lead them away from news (or to keep them from forming an interest in it in the first place).
Moreover, algorithms may compound the likelihood that young people will not develop a news habit even as they age. If young users never like, follow, or otherwise engage with anything related to news topics online, thereby training algorithms to screen out such content, they may not get enough initial exposure to ignite an interest that could develop later on.
For news lovers, the ease of access afforded by digital media makes it possible to consume larger and larger quantities of news—to convert a personal preference into something akin to an addiction. But, for avoiders, especially young ones, these same infrastructures may well be integral to why and how some turn away from news altogether.
News avoidance, gender, and class
As is so often the case, patterns in the United States are not necessarily replicated elsewhere in the world. Differences in rates of news consumption along ideological lines tend to be relatively small in most countries. What’s more, they also are quite small in comparison to the much larger divide between those who are unsure about where to place themselves ideologically at all versus those who identify themselves on the right or the left. In the DNR 2022, rates of consistent news avoidance are higher on the ideological right in only about a third of all markets, but they are disproportionately highest practically everywhere among those who say they “don’t know” where they stand on the political spectrum. In most countries, the latter segment also tends to be a larger share of the public compared to the number of people who place themselves on either the left or the right.This raises a separate issue around ideology that is also evident in William’s story. Up until recent changes in the political climate, William had not necessarily considered himself particularly interested in politics. He didn’t grow up in a family that talked much about it. “Politics is one of those things where it’s not super important to a lot of people,” he said. “It’s low on the totem pole of things that have happened to our family in the last decade or so.” This aspect of William’s orientation to political life is especially typical of consistent news avoiders. Indeed, both Andrea and Sofía said they were uninterested or actively turned off by politics. In our U.S. survey, when we asked how interested respondents were in “information about what’s going on in government and politics,” news lovers and more typical news users were vastly more likely than news avoiders to say they were interested.
In fact, across most countries no single variable is more predictive of whether someone consistently avoids news than their level of interest in politics and civic affairs. In every market in the DNR 2021, news avoidance is more concentrated among those who say they are not interested in politics and nearly nonexistent among those who say they are.
Research has long documented that news use and political interest feed on each other. It is difficult to say one causes the other, but they reinforce each other in a feedback loop sometimes called a “virtuous circle.” That is, just as many people pay attention to news because they are interested in politics, the reverse is also true: many become interested in politics because they pay closer attention to news. As the political communication scholars Judith Moeller and Claes de Vreese note in their study of political learning among adolescents, “The more people know about politics, the more they are inclined to take on an active role in a democracy,” and the more people follow the news, the more likely they are to be knowledgeable about the public agenda and the political issues and affairs that are the substance of public life. Some researchers now suggest that as media infrastructures have fragmented and become more varied, political interest has become more important as a deciding factor in how much news individuals consume.
We think this divide around political interest deserves some additional attention because the issue is not just that news avoiders are less interested in politics but also that they tend to view themselves as less equipped to engage in political life—to effect change or make a difference in their political system. Political scientists call this attitude “political efficacy,” or the “feeling that political and social change is possible, and that the individual citizen can play a part in bringing about this change.” In our U.S. survey data, we see a small though significant difference in the strength of these attitudes among news lovers compared to news avoiders, who tend to view themselves as not only less interested in politics but somewhat less empowered as well.
These differences may seem minor, but there is more to them than meets the eye. In particular, it is important to differentiate between what political scientists refer to as political efficacy’s internal and external dimensions. That is, for some people, a lack of political efficacy comes down to feeling internally as if they have little power or agency to create political change, whereas others see the source of the problem as external to themselves, viewing the political system as largely unresponsive to the public. Divides along lines of political efficacy tend to be much larger in its internal dimensions. That said, in practice, just like age, gender, and class, the two dimensions of political efficacy are not easily reducible to distinct independent variables in surveys. Such variables are in fact interdependent and intertwined, at least in people’s lived experiences.
This excerpt has sought to set the stage for those that follow by answering a basic yet elusive question: “Who are consistent news avoiders?” Survey data shows clear patterns around age, gender, socioeconomic class, and political interest, but only by looking more closely at individual lives—as we have tried to do with Sofía in Spain, Andrea in the United Kingdom, and William in the United States—do we get a sense of how and why these patterns occur. Importantly, the key point is not that all or even most young adults, women, or people from lower socioeconomic classes avoid news consistently but rather that consistent news avoidance is more common in these groups than among older adults, men, and the wealthy and more educated. The examples of Sofía, Andrea, and William further illustrate how news avoidance is a product of individuals’ identities, ideologies, and infrastructures as well as how news avoidance contributes to inequalities on a macrolevel.
News avoidance would be less worrisome if it were simply a matter of personal taste, but information is deeply linked to power and privilege. How well we are able to navigate the systems that shape our lives depends to a large extent on how much we know about how those systems are organized and how empowered we feel to change them. Paying attention to news can provide people with the keys to unlock those systems, but, as we have seen, groups more likely to avoid news consistently also tend to be those that are already relatively disadvantaged.
Of course, there are other aspects of inequality that we have not highlighted, mostly because they did not come up as often in our interviews. Race and ethnicity, for example, so central a factor in American politics, does not appear to be a major driver of news avoidance. That was also the case in our survey data. That is, Black and Hispanic respondents were just as likely to be news avoiders or news lovers as white respondents. However, the fact that race and ethnicity are not important for differentiating between news avoiders and other types of news consumers does not mean that racial and ethnic identities do not matter for people’s relationships to news. Indeed, social identities rooted in race can be important lenses through which people make sense of their own media choices. The same can be said for many other aspects of identity, including religion, sexuality, culture, and place.
In many instances, we have highlighted general tendencies—averages—to make some broad points about what types of people tend to avoid news and why those patterns persist. But it is worth underscoring that each of the individuals we interviewed cannot be easily reduced to a set of quantifiable variables. The best way to understand them and the way they think and feel about news is to listen closely to how they explain their news avoidance in their own words—to their media choice narratives.
Photo by Caleb Woods.