https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8901-7041
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ABSTRACT
As Australia imposed some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns, governments and mental health organisations released advice for preserving mental wellbeing throughout the pandemic. One common suggestion was to avoid excessive news consumption. This article reports findings from a study that explored why, how, and with what outcomes people engaged in news avoidance practices. We conducted interviews with 20 participants from the Australian state of Victoria which experienced the country’s most sustained lockdown measures. Our data shows that people restricted their news consumption for a range of wellbeing-related reasons. Avoidance practices were shaped by household contexts and involved strategies for remaining informed to a limited degree. These findings contribute to an emerging evidence base that points to the benefits of partial news avoidance. They also reiterate the value of public health advice that suggests limiting news during a crisis. We go on to argue that the prevalence of news avoidance practices during long-term crises raises significant practical implications for news organisations.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our research participants who generously contributed their time and personal reflections during a challenging period.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This mirrors an approach used by social media researchers where data is gathered by posing questions to Twitter followers (Marwick and boyd Citation2011).
2 The study gained ethics approval from the RMIT University Human Research Ethics Committee (Project ID 23620).
3 One of our participants was a registered Labor member. Their frustration with the media’s criticism of Victoria’s labor government was heavily informed by their personal commitment and contribution to the party.
4 There is a substantial body of research on practices of selective exposure (e.g., Garrett, Carnahan, and Lynch Citation2013). These practices involve avoiding information for ideological reasons rather than because of a desire to reduce overall news consumption. That said, practices of news avoidance and selective exposure are likely to overlap at times so future research may consider mapping the distinctions between them more programmatically.