Antecedents of News Avoidance: Competing Effects of Political Interest, News Overload, Trust in News Media, and “News Finds Me” Perception

Abstract

Recent changes in the media environment make it easier than ever for people to actively shape their news repertoires according to their habits, needs, and preferences. As convenient as these practices seem, they may favor the development of misperceptions such as “news finds me” perception (NFM) and make it easier for some people to disconnect from news and political content. Building on the conceptualization of news avoidance as a general disposition and its consequential behaviors, this study jointly examines key individual-level predispositions that may motivate intentional news avoidance. Based on a two-wave survey collected in the United States, our results largely corroborate previous work showing the association of political interest, news overload, and trust in professional news with news avoidance, and stress the importance of including the NFM in the theoretical and empirical modelling of news avoidance. Our analyses also suggest that the linkages between these individual-level antecedents and news avoidance are contingent upon the design and robustness of the empirical tests, with NFM yielding the most consistent association across models.

Keywords:

• News avoidance
• political interest
• news overload
• trust in news media
• “news finds me” perception
• new media

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to all members of the Media Innovation Lab (University of Vienna) for their help with the data collection for this study.

Disclosure Statement

There is no conflict of interest in relation to this article.

Notes

1 Park (2019) is an exception to this and uses two waves of survey data from South Korean adults to test a model for direct and indirect effects of news overload on news avoidance. Although not specifically focused on news avoidance but rather on news consumption, it is also relevant to mention the longitudinal study by Strömbäck, Djerf-Pierre, and Shehata (2013).

2 Given the large number of independent variables involved in this study and the long time-lag between waves (four months), we expected relatively small relationships. We therefore needed large sample and subsample sizes. These first two waves of the project are larger, more demographically diverse, and less subject to attrition.

3 Although it should be recalled that the relationship was non-significant in the fully controlled autoregressive model (see results).

Additional information

Funding

The second author is funded by the “Viera y Clavijo” Program from the Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información and the Universidad de La Laguna.