Why People Avoid News: Explaining the Democratic Challenges of News Avoidance

The role of media audiences in the architecture of liberal democracy has always been pivotal. An informed citizenry is a necessary precursor of a wealthy democratic system; and in the last few decades (marked by party erosion, populism, and ideological dealignment) this role has become even more central, pointing at the establishment of the so-called “audience democracy”. However, news consumption habits are constantly changing and challenging the stability of democracy. After some years of debate about the rise of a “disinformation order” in political communication production and consumption, we are witnessing the rise of illiberal trends and citizens’ mistrust toward intermediate bodies (not only politics but also journalism and the media). Although those are not novel phenomena, parallelly we would need a closer look at how the audiences relate to political news, or choose not to relate to them at all. Indeed, the latest data from the Reuters’ Digital News Report indicate that 56% of the audience across 46 countries tend to avoid news periodically, as a sort of ‘detoxification’, and 32% avoid some news regarding certain topics or events, that are characterised for being ‘emotionally draining’, i.e. selective news avoidance. In particular, news avoidance describes the resistance or rejection of news, whether intentional or not, depending on the motivations of the audience. While there is a relative consensus on this minimum definition, the existing literature strongly diverges on identifying the causes and consequences of news avoidance, mainly depending on the scientific and methodological approach adopted to address the issue. The paper intends to examine the challenges posited to democracy by the phenomenon of news avoidance, bridging an extensive literature spanning from media studies to political sociology. Besides discussing the current definitions of news avoidance, the presentation will focus on the different explanatory models offered by the existing literature, identifying the corresponding democratic challenges. Particularly, the phenomenon of news avoidance will be connected to four interrelated and overarching trends that characterise the public sphere in many national contexts: (a) the platformisation of the society, a process that implies the ‘infiltration’ of platforms in all social relationships, and also between citizens, media and institutions, through the mediation of algorithms and their underlying logic; (b) the abundance of information and points of access to news, also critically known as information overload, that pushes audiences, platforms and journalists to perfectionate the segmentation and tailorisation of content, mostly through algorithmic control; (c) the establishment of an information disorder that ‘pollutes’ the media ecosystem and compromise the relationships among citizens, media and institutions; (d) the ongoing decline of trust in news media outlets, whether legacy or platform-led, although for different reasons and at different degrees over countries, that is paired by the parallel decline of trust in political institutions. The study is part of a broader research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Research that investigates news avoidance in relation to emotions and trust.