What We Can Learn From News Avoiders

PIL: Your new book, Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, written with Ruth Palmer and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, delves into the experiences of people who actively avoid the news in Britain, Spain, and the US. Given this is a relatively small percentage of the population — somewhere between three and ten percent worldwide — why is it important to pay attention to the sample you selected?

Benjamin: It is a relatively small portion of the public; however, to put that in perspective, it’s comparable in numbers to the percentage of people who pay for digital subscriptions to news organizations in many countries. So it is small, yes, but most of the time journalists are already quite fixated on relatively small portions of the public who constitute the highly engaged readers and listeners and viewers they hear from most often. The other thing is, as we argue in the book, this population of consistent news avoiders has a lot more in common with most typical news consumers, who tend to be fairly disconnected from news and what it is that journalists do than the highly engaged portions of the public who regularly consume lots of news. We make the case that the perspectives we capture in the book may ultimately be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the larger phenomenon of news avoidance among the broader public. These are individuals who have largely stopped consuming any news, but the reasons behind that and the broader factors driving these changes are not so different from the forces behind why many people more generally are consuming less and less news, even if most haven’t gone so far as to cut news out of their lives entirely.

PIL: In your book, you argue that people’s attitudes toward journalism are influenced by their identities, their ideologies, and the infrastructures through which they get news. You also explore some “folk theories” that you heard from your research subjects. What are those folk theories, and how do they inform the ways people understand the news?

Benjamin: We focus on several different “folk theories,” or understandings about the way the world works, that we heard news avoiders articulate over the course of our interviews across the three countries. Mostly, these came up around people’s sense of what it means to stay informed in the contemporary digital media environment. Many talked about, for example, the notion that having a conventional routine around consuming news such as reading a newspaper or watching the evening news felt old fashioned because they felt like “news finds me” when they went on social media or opened up their mobile phones. In that sense, news was readily available whether they went looking for it or not — even if in practice people did not always reliably have this experience or in some cases had deliberately taken themselves off social media platforms so they did not in fact encounter much news in their everyday lives. Likewise, many said they felt like “the information is out there” on the internet, waiting to be discovered, just a Google search away, should they want to find out the latest information about what might be happening in the world.

That confidence — perhaps even overconfidence — in being able to, say, surgically extract the relevant info from the web often presumed that some journalist somewhere had actually gone out and reported it. That was not always (or even most of the time) borne out in practice. Even when people could find what they were looking for, many also said they struggled with knowing how to evaluate it. And that’s one of the third folk theories we heard often among news avoiders, which we call “I don’t know what to believe.” It’s one we heard especially often from those who were less digitally savvy or media literate, which often applied to many of the news avoiders we interviewed. Like many people, they struggled to figure out which sources of information they could trust on the occasions when they had tried to Google for information or they encountered news on social media. Without a longer term relationship with any particular sources of news they did place their trust in, they felt like they had to dig through dozens and dozens of sources on any news story they might encounter, or else open themselves up to being manipulated and misled. For many news avoiders, they felt like it was therefore smarter to just tune it all out. 

PIL: When interviewing people for Avoiding the News, you learned there was a significant social aspect to news, which we also found to be true in our 2018 research study about how college students engage with news. In your study, you found this was partly due to childhood exposure to news, but was even more significant in adulthood. Avid news consumers enjoyed talking about news — political news in particular — and developed a form of personal curation to help them sort through news sources. News avoiders not only lacked knowledge about sources, they felt more in control if they used Google to “do the research” themselves. What leads to this combination of lack of trust in journalism and faith that Google and their own search skills can provide information that is more reliable? 

Benjamin: Many people have really internalized the message about the digital media environment being filled with unreliable information. Particularly in a country like the US, where in addition to all the other frustrations people have about clickbait and sensationalism and sponsored content on social media masquerading as news, people are also really wary of how polarized our political system is. So most have a presumption that every news story is also going to be polarized along partisan lines and they assume some level of bias and ulterior motives are at work shaping what they are seeing. They couldn’t necessarily point to precisely how or in what ways news reporting may be inaccurate or biased but many were certain some unseen political or commercial forces were operating behind the scenes. At the same time, it is worth noting that both cable television and digital media have really prioritized commentary and opinion, which often circulates alongside news and may or may not always be labeled clearly as such.

All of which is to say, given these intertwined factors, it is understandable why many feel like it’s smarter to adopt a generally skeptical stance toward all news. A lot of times news avoiders described feeling like they were really ill-equipped to make sense of these differing perspectives in the news media — either because they themselves were really uncertain about where they fit politically or because they had close friends or family on different sides of the spectrum whose strong political convictions meant they were often getting cross-cutting views on the occasions in which they did try and engage. For some, avoiding news was therefore a convenient way to opt out of these kinds of conversations, while for others, they just felt like they needed to decide for themselves what they could really believe. It is in that context that “doing your own research” can be really seductive. Discovering information on your own, piecing together the “real story” by digging through whatever one finds on Google — that can feel really empowering, especially if you think other sources cannot be depended on to serve as honest brokers.

And just like the folk theories I mentioned above, there are grains of truth here. These technologies are powerful tools and it IS important to be critical news consumers. But I do think independent professional journalism remains essential in a way that is quite distinct from other sources of information. The information isn’t just “out there” and doesn’t just appear in social media feeds, but in fact, news gathering and reporting and fact-checking takes real work and training and resources — all of which is woefully underappreciated. 

PIL: One of the difficult aspects of evaluating news in our current environment is addressing the influence of popular political outlets that don’t follow traditional journalistic practices in news gathering and cast “mainstream media” as fundamentally corrupt. This makes it hard for teachers and librarians to help people learn how to seek out quality sources. Do you see ways to help people learn about the practices that lead to high quality and trustworthy news while avoiding the political bifurcation that is so tightly tied to their identity?

Benjamin: I think one starting point is around helping people start to differentiate between sources of information. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about news and journalism. News is news to them and they are pretty sure it’s biased or “fake” and that’s the end of it. So first of all, I think it’s useful to focus on all the variation that exists across news media whether it’s public radio or public television, local TV news, nonprofit news outlets, ethnic media, etc. There are real differences across these wide range of sources and I think for some people that can be eye opening. Local news in particular seems like an area where there are opportunities here. While politics is to some extent everywhere, local issues do not always cleave the public into the same ideological divides we see nationally. Plus there is both a more immediate connection to people’s daily lives in a way that can be more abstract with national news and often ways of taking more direct action in civic life at the local level that can feel less daunting for people. So part of appreciating that variety is also about helping people make distinctions between local journalism, national political reporting, and everything in between.

It seems like a basic point, but all that variety is also part of the problem. It can just feel overwhelming. So that’s the second thing. People need some kind of a roadmap for how to navigate the contemporary environment given the range of sources they may be encountering, knowing what to pay attention to or how to evaluate which sources practice journalism differently and why. For some that means paying close attention to ownership and advertising. For others, it’s about understanding a news organization’s editorial mission and the journalistic practices that govern the way they do this work.

These are the kinds of things journalists themselves pay a lot of attention to when evaluating sources of information, but most people are busy. They aren’t going to spend the time auditing a news site’s mission statement and board of directors every time they click a link. So the third thing is around building a sense of familiarity with the different sources that they will likely encounter so they don’t feel like they have to spend an hour doing their own research whenever they see something new. Deciding it’s okay to trust some sources, as imperfect as they may be, is actually a much more efficient way to operate in the world! But sometimes people think placing their trust in any news organization is naive and leaves them vulnerable.

And then a fourth thing I would point to is helping people differentiate between original reported news and commentary. Both can be valuable in different ways, but our digital spaces and cable TV airways make the boundaries a lot harder to discern compared to a world in which opinion content was confined to a particular section of the newspaper. Again, a seemingly basic point, but it’s one that time and again people struggle with deciphering. 

PIL: In your chapter about ways to make news more relevant and responsive to news avoiders, you discuss how news literacy efforts in the schools could play a role. Yet many adults never had that kind of instruction in school, or if they did, it was focused on a very different media environment, when trust was higher and news organizations played a more direct role in providing news. Are there institutions beyond formal education settings such as public libraries or civic organizations that could help adults gain better skills and habits? What might such learning look like? 

Benjamin: It’s such a great question and one that I know more and more researchers and community groups are focused on. When we discuss media literacy in my classes at Minnesota, my students will typically point out that they feel it’s their parents and grandparents, not them, who they see struggling most often with figuring out how to navigate the digital spaces that they themselves largely grew up with. Libraries, churches, other civic organizations that people may belong to, these institutions can all play a role here. No one likes to be told they are doing something wrong in how they access and navigate information, so I do think it has to start in places where people feel some existing level of trust and can talk through this stuff without feeling judged.

The other thing I would say is news organizations themselves can and should play an important role here as well. For far too long many news outlets have taken the position that their work speaks for itself and they have not been particularly proactive about explaining what goes into their journalism or why it is distinct from other sources of information people may be seeing online. In other instances, they have prioritized clicks and the scale of their reach on platforms over the forms of journalism most likely to generate trust among the public. We argue in the book that there is much more than individual news outlets and the industry collectively can and should be doing to help make the case for the value of news and what is unique about professionally produced journalism rather than allowing others to define it for them. I can imagine one way of helping to engage the public around these matters would be through partnering with civic organizations and public libraries to be a more concrete presence in people’s communities. Of course doing this work takes time and resources, both of which are in short supply in many newsrooms, so this is much easier said than done, but those are the kinds of efforts where I see the most promise.

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Benjamin Toff is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, and is affiliated with the university’s Center for the Study of Political Psychology. From 2020 to 2023, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he led the Trust in News Project. 

Dr. Toff earned his doctoral degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, with his dissertation winning awards from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in American government and in political communication. Previously, he worked as a journalist, with his writing appearing in New York magazine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, where he also worked as a full time researcher and assistant to op/ed columnist Frank Rich from 2005 – 2011. Toff is currently at work on a book, based on his dissertation research, about how journalists portray public opinion. 

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about new media, information-seeking behavior, and the use of technology for teaching and learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL). PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find, use, and create information for academic courses and solving information problems in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.​

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Suggested citation format: “What We Can Learn From News Avoiders,” (email interview) by Barbara Fister, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 38 (22 February 2024). This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License.