Avoiding the news makes sense. Here's how to get back into the know.
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My 9-year-old has a subscription to a great little news magazine called The Week Jr., which comes in the mail like clockwork, and that my kid reads over bedtime snack.
This week’s issue featured stories about birds that thrive in urban spaces, the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lam, and a host of recipes for summertime popsicles.
It also featured a story about the floods in south-central Texas, and the children who died in Texas while at their sleepaway camp along the Guadalupe River.
“Kids died? At camp?”
They read the story carefully: about the heavy rainfall, the way the dry soil in the area doesn’t absorb water, and quickly filled the streams, which flowed into the river.
And then they closed the magazine.
Like my kid, I often just don’t want to read the news. And I know I’m not alone. This is called news avoidance, and it’s a widespread reaction to the overwhelming torrent of terrible news.
This is where I, as a journalist and someone who teaches journalism, am supposed to tell you all the reasons it’s bad to avoid reading or watching the news. For example:
News avoidance is bad news for journalists, and for readers, and it is terrible for our democracy.
It lets corruption spread because concerned citizens aren’t engaged with holding the powerful to account. It creates apathy around news deserts, where whole swaths of the country don’t have a reliable local news source.
It indirectly means that misinformation can spread because if we avoid reading the news, media outlets are more inclined to pump out “infotainment” and outright lies, to try to attract as many eyeballs as possible (clicks = dollars).
But news avoidance also makes total sense.
We want information that will help to us understand the world, and participate in it in meaningful ways. That can be climate news or news about the war in Ukraine; it can be home decorating advice or Netflix reviews.
Whatever it is, you want to be able to trust it.
The people most likely to avoid the news are young people, women and members of marginalized communities.
Not only are these groups rarely represented in news stories – when they are, it’s usually through stories about tragedy. Most newsrooms still operate with the attitude “we publish, you read.” It’s top-down, hierarchical, and alienating, not to mention totally exhausting.
Fortunately, new research from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford about why people avoid news has helped me understand some of what could be different here, and some of the ways readers could be better served.
News feels bad, but doesn’t have to be that way. Stories that are focused on solutions to our myriad problems tend to make people feel better, because it gives them a sense of hope and possibility and not just gloom and despair.
People who avoid news felt that journalists could do a better job explaining ‘how this could affect you, and what you can do about it.”
That gap left readers “trying to fill in that gap on their own,” the researchers wrote. “And without that link to their lives clearly articulated, many news avoiders saw little reason to consume news that would just upset them.”
The news can be isolating, but it could build a sense of community. That community is why newsletters like this and many others can thrive, because so often you find your people in these spaces. (To be sure, that comes with a dangerous echo chamber effect, so we all need to get better at watching our biases).
Many news outlets already build a sense of belonging among their elite readers (the “How To Spend It” column of the Financial Times definitely tells rich people they matter, the researchers point out), but wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to have loads of extra cash to feel like we belonged?
Teaching kids – and grown-ups – how news gets made (researched, reported, verified) helps make news feel more trustworthy. The research found that people who avoid the news didn’t know much about how news gets reported, “making it difficult for them to distinguish between sources that produce news and sources that just regurgitate it with a twist.”
The Oxford researchers used survey data and hundreds of interviews with people who consistently avoided the news in the UK, Spain, and the US to conduct their study. Their other recommendations — keep it short and simple (most news avoiders in the U.K. and the U.S. have less than a 6th grade literacy level) and make sure you can read it easily on a phone — are also important and will serve all of us.
Finally, researchers argue that journalists have to make the case for the value of their work. They can’t just assume that people know journalism is important – a coordinated campaign to let folks know why journalism matters could go a long way in shifting perspectives, the researchers argued.
All this is to say that, if you feel like you just can’t deal with the headlines today, remember that it’s not all on you to make that change. There are plenty of things news organizations could be doing differently. And then it’s up to us to support those news outlets that do.
After my kid put down their magazine, I kept reading the story about the Texas floods. It featured a section on how people are getting help and the 1,700 emergency workers and volunteers who responded to the flood. It described volunteers on horseback, sometimes carrying two children in one arm. It talked about a Coast Guard rescue swimmer who saved 165 people at the camp.
None of those details took away from the tragedy, or the reasons why the floodwaters got so high, or the tragedy of the government’s disinvestment from FEMA.
The stories of volunteers helping out don’t mitigate the massive challenges ahead, but they do lighten the heart, just enough to keep reading.
This is so relatable, I actually happened to be on family trip and off screens when the flooding happened, and when I heard I just couldn’t bring myself to read about it at all. Just so sad.
At the same time I normally consume a lot of news and these strategies are really good for not letting it take over!