Dr. Benjamin Toff - Avoiding News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism

One of the most consistent themes in communication research is the assumption that journalism’s main democratic function is to enable the public to make informed political decisions and hold power to account. But a considerable share of the public say they rarely or never follow the news, and a growing number around the world say they actively avoid it. This presentation will provide an overview of research on this phenomenon of ‘news avoidance,’ summarizing findings from a forthcoming book that draws on more than a hundred in-depth interviews with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the US as well as survey data from a wide range of countries. Much of the presentation will focus on one particular aspect of the phenomenon: the role of emotions and ‘anticipated anxiety’. For many news avoiders, preexisting perspectives about what news is (anxiety-inducing) and offers for them (little practical value) play an important role in shaping attitudes toward news and subsequent behavior. While political communication scholarship has often treated news consumption as the cornerstone of good citizenship, we find avoiders hold uneven, weakly internalized norms about a perceived duty to stay informed, in part because they anticipate news will make them anxious without being relevant to their lives, resulting in limited engagement with news, and by extension, civic and political affairs. Promoting more informed societies requires grappling with these entrenched perspectives.

About

Dr. Benjamin Toff is assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, and senior research fellow at the Reuters institute in Oxford. The talk builds on a book in progress and on the published article: How News Feels: Anticipated Anxiety as a Factor in News Avoidance and a Barrier to Political Engagement