“Because the News is Depressing as Hell”: Journalists’ Explanations of News Avoidance

Abstract

What journalists believe about the growing phenomenon of news avoidance will affect the way they address it. In this paper we use an iterative, mixed-methods approach to analyze responses to an open-ended survey question which asked US journalists why they believe people consume little to no news. Our data analysis consisted of 3-phases: an inductive close reading to detect initial patterns, a quantification of patterns through a word frequency analysis, and a final close reading. We find that journalists’ responses about why people avoid news fit into three main categories based on whom or what they identified as responsible for this behavior. Some of these sources of blame were much more common than others, and they were associated with different tones, ranging from condescending to sympathetic. The most common reasons supplied were those blaming news itself (e.g., news is negative or biased), followed by those blaming contextual factors (e.g., life circumstances or competition from social media), and those blaming news avoiders themselves. In the discussion, we compare journalists’ beliefs about the causes of news avoidance with findings from research on news avoiders themselves and explore implications for possible efforts to address news avoidance in the future.

Keywords:

• News avoidance
• news consumption
• imagined audience
• journalists
• survey
• mixed methods
• computational grounded theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Of the 55 excluded cases, eight responses were removed because participants indicated that they could not provide an answer (i.e., “not sure,” “no idea”); 47 were excluded because the participants did not provide a response.

2 A 2-gram analysis was selected to account for words like “social media.” The standard package of LIWC-22 stop words were used. However, 11 words were deemed topic relevant and therefore moved from the stop word list: able, bad, feel, know, new, novel, old, useful, value, web, and ignored.

3 Examples of high frequency words that were irrelevant (and thus not included in the dictionary lists) include: news, people, media, avoid, lives, information, life, consume, things, avoid news.

4 For example, the word “bliss” is often associated with a positive tone (bliss is included in the LIWC-22 positive tone dictionary). However, in our responses many journalists used this word in the phrase “ignorance is bliss,” which suggests something different. Furthermore, when consulting the entire response (placing this word in context), the phrase “ignorance is bliss” was often used in a condescending manner directed at the blaming of news avoiders. For this reason, we analyze the data qualitatively to better understand the nuanced differences in responses (as seen by word choice, punctuation, and syntax) and the connection between categories of blame and journalists’ overall tone.