(Roughly) Daily

As Josie Harvey reports, unlimited access to “doomscrolling” and the resultant emotional toll of constant negative news has led to record-high news avoidance…

News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.

The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely…

… Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.

The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information…

[Harvey reviews the dynamics at play– overabundance, challenges to mental health– concluding that limited, mindful access may be the key…]

… Benjamin Toff, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota, studied the trend in his book Avoiding the News. He draws a key distinction between those who consistently avoid the news and those who simply limit their consumption – the latter, he says, is “perfectly healthy”.

“We live in a world in which you can access news 24/7 and be inundated with information at all times. But that doesn’t mean you should,” he said.

What worries him and his co-authors is when withdrawal turns into a cycle that deepens social divides, leaving some groups less likely to participate in political life.

“The more you disengage, disconnect from the news, the harder it becomes to try to make sense of what’s happening on any given story,” he explained.

The authors observed that consistent news avoidance tends to be more common among young people, women, and lower socioeconomic classes.

“If you believe as we do, that normatively, we want people to be able to have the same opportunities to engage politically, to vote, to be vocal about the political issues that matter, then we think it’s a problem that people are disengaging from news,” Toff said.

If “printer’s ink” is the lifeblood of democracy, we have an issue: “Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’,” from @josieharvey.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.

* Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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As we survive the surfeit, we might recall one of the larger steps toward the media environment in which we wallow was taken on this date in 1982: USA Today dropped its first issue.

The paper’s overall style– shorter articles, color photographs, an elevated use of graphics… and no longer, in-depth stories– was unique among newspapers at the time. Critics were largely unamused, referring to it as a “McPaper” or “television you can wrap fish in.” But as it succeeded, it changed the appearance and feel of newspapers around the world (in ways that anticipated the content and form/design of online jouranlism). Today, of course, while a print version survives, USA Today’s primary footprint is digital.