Addressing selective news avoidance
We continue to explore the Reuters Institute's annual report (DNR 2023):
The issue. Last year's Digital News Report highlighted the issue of news avoidance: people actively choosing to avoid the news, often around certain topics such as war or climate change. In this year’s data, we find continued high levels of selective avoidance (people who say they actively do it sometimes or often), with the headline rate at 36%, 7 percentage points above the figure in 2017 but two points lower than last year.
Who avoids the news? This year, news avoidance was down in the UK and Brazil but up some other countries, such as Greece, Bulgaria, and Poland. Across all markets, women are more likely to be news avoiders than men, with 39% of women saying they sometimes or often actively try to avoid the news versus 33% of men.
How they avoid the news? Around half of avoiders (53%), including many younger people and those with lower levels of education, are trying to do so in a broad-brush or periodic way – for example, by turning off the radio when the news comes on, or by scrolling past the news in social media. A second group tends to avoid news by taking more specific actions, like checking the news less often (52% of avoiders) or by avoiding certain news topics (32% of avoiders).
What topics they avoid? Avoidance of the war in Ukraine is widespread, with almost four in ten (39%) across markets saying they had avoided news on this topic. This is particularly high in countries geographically close to the conflict such as Finland (75%), Czech Republic (60%) and Germany (52%). Other topics often avoided across markets are national politics (38%), issues around social justice (31%), news about crime (30%), and celebrity news (28%).
Addressing news avoidance? We asked our respondents what they think of a range of approaches publishers are adopting to tackle news avoidance. We found avoiders are much less interested in the latest twists and turns of the big news stories of the day (35%), compared with those that never avoid the news (62%).
