Conceptualizing News Avoidance: Towards a Shared Understanding of Different Causes

Conceptualizing News Avoidance: Towards a Shared Understanding of Different Causes and Potential Solutions. Morten Skovsgaard & Kim Andersen. Journalism Studies, Nov 11 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2019.1686410

ABSTRACT: News avoidance is considered an increasing problem for the news industry and democracy at large. As news companies lose consumers, democracy loses the informed foundation for an engaged citizenry. Meanwhile, research on news avoidance is hampered by the lack of a common understanding of the phenomenon. In this conceptual study, we first review and discuss extant conceptualizations and operationalisations of news avoidance. Second, we present a model distinguishing two types of news avoidance—intentional and unintentional—depending on the underlying causes leading people to tune out. Third, we argue that different solutions apply to the two types of news avoidance. To engage intentional news avoiders, the news selection and news presentation must to be changed. To engage unintentional news avoiders, the opportunity structures provided in the media system must be more favourable towards inadvertent news exposure.

KEYWORDS: News avoidance, news consumption, media trust, news overload, media preferences, opportunity structures, inadvertent audiences

Discussion

The presented model with intentional and unintentional news avoidance, their causes and potential solutions developed in this article offers a vantage point for future research on news avoidance. It serves as a foundation for more conceptual rigour when addressing questions concerning news avoidance, and it highlights a number of research agendas connected to news avoidance, which deserve further attention. For example, conditions for and effects of constructive journalism, journalistic credibility, slow journalism, and opportunity structures for inadvertent news exposure.

Even though the model invites systematic thinking about news avoidance, it also raises questions that are important to consider. First, the model cannot capture the full complexity of news avoidance and its causes and solutions. Any useful model must reduce reality, highlight patterns, and give a systematic overview over a broader phenomenon. Thus, a specific individual’s news avoidance might not fit cleanly into the boxes of the model as it can have several different causes that might not be easily disentangled. The two types of news avoidance should therefore be understood as ideal types that aid conceptual and systematic thinking about the concept. For instance, there is a fine line between intentional news avoidance due to news overload, where the individual actively averts the news, and unintentional news avoidance based on a plethora of content on display that leads an individual to opt for entertainment rather than news. In this situation, we need to know the exact constellation of preferences to determine whether the news avoidance is intentional or unintentional. This can be difficult because people are not always able to clearly express their preferences, and preferences are not clean and stable constructs (e.g., Swart, Peters, and Broersma 2017). The potential volatility of preferences stresses that news avoidance can also be a dynamic as well as a stable behaviour. Factors such as upbringing, socialization, education, existing political knowledge, and interest are known to affect an individual’s level of news exposure, and they can indirectly cause news avoidance through their impact on preferences. These structural factors add a rather stable layer to preferences and potentially constitute a “habitual” news avoidance that is the hardest to reverse because it would demand a broad societal effort. Other factors that impact preferences, however, are less stable, such as the individual’s mood,utility of the content, and the gratifications pursued (Webster 2014). These factors can lead to “situational” or periodic news avoidance that will more easily be affected by changes in selection and presentation of news.

The distinction between “habitual” and “situational” feeds into the normative question whether we should worry about news avoidance in the first place. While news exposure has a positive impact on political knowledge and engagement (e.g., Aalberg and Curran 2012; Norris 2000), some types of news have been shown to make people more cynical and pessimistic (e.g., Boukes and Vliegenthart 2017; Cappella and Jamieson 1997). Thus, news avoidance can have both negative and positive implications. However, changing the selection and presentation of news to reduce news avoidance, for instance, by selecting less negative news or by presenting solutions to the reported problems, may also reduce some of the negative effects generated by news exposure.

The extent to which news avoidance is a democratic problem cannot be determined by empirical studies of the effects of news alone. It also depends on the conception of democracy. In participatory or deliberative conceptions of democracy, on the one hand, citizens must be knowledgeable and must consistently be mobilized. Avoiding news will lead to less mobilization and less knowledge, and in these conceptions of democracy news avoidance is an obvious problem. On the other hand, in a competitive democracy, citizens should be mobilized to vote at regular competitive elections where they must have enough information to choose between different politicians (Strömbäck2005). The implication is that periodic or situational news avoidance might not be a huge problem if the individual is ready to “jump back in” during election time, during reporting on political misconduct, or in the case of other significant news (e.g., Strömbäck2017; Toff and Nielsen2018). This is what Schudson (1998) labelled the monitorial citizens. Habitual news avoidance, however, would still present a problem because habitual news avoiders would be unlikely to possess the information and knowledge needed to assess the political alternatives in an election.The negative democratic effects of news avoidance can also be alleviated if people manage to stay informed in other ways. We defined news as novel information about relatively recent affairs of public interest or importance provided by journalists.

In today’s media environment, however, political information is also prominent in other genres, such as satire, talk shows, and fictional political dramas (Holbert 2005). It is possible that people to a certain extent can update themselves via these genres without being exposed to news, but evidence is mixed (e.g., Baek and Wojcieszak 2009; Becker and Bode 2018),and the effects seem to depend on a positive motivation for news in the first place (Feldman 2013).

Nevertheless, these findings highlight that it is important to take into account how people process, make sense of, and engage with the information they encounter, be it news or other content that potentially carries political information (Swart, Peters, and Broersma 2017). Some news avoiders tend to rely on a “news find me” approach (Gil deZúñiga, Weeks, and Ardèvol-Abreu 2017; Toff and Nielsen2018). That is, if an issue covered by the news media is significant enough, it will find a way to them becauset hey rely on people in their network to keep them informed (e.g., Andersen and Hopmann2018; Druckman, Levendusky, and McLain2018). Obviously, this two-step flow demands that the people passing information on follow the news rather closely in the first place, and that the receivers are able to process and put into context the information that is encountered this way.

The questions raised above illustrate that news avoidance is a complex concept in need of systematic conceptualization and empirical study. The model developed and presented in this article provides a framework for thinking systematically about news avoidance, its causes, and its potential solutions, and the discussion highlights some of the important questions that empirical studies based on the model can help answer.