#newsavoidance — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #newsavoidance, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: August 5, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Democrats and Republicans show different reactions to unfavorable news
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-partisans-change-their-news-habits-when-the-headlines-look-bad/
People actively alter how much and what kind of news they read depending on whether the day’s headlines are favorable or unfavorable to their preferred political party. New research published in the American Journal of Political Science demonstrates that news consumption is highly dynamic, with both Democrats and Republicans shifting their browsing habits in response to negative coverage. These shifts can include avoiding hard news, ending a reading session early, or retreating to ideologically aligned outlets.
In the modern media environment, people face an overwhelming amount of information and almost limitless choices about what to read. Researchers have studied how this abundance affects political knowledge, often focusing on two broad behaviors. The first is selective exposure, where individuals seek out news outlets that confirm their existing political beliefs. The second is news avoidance, a behavior where people disengage from current events entirely, often due to feelings of anxiety or information overload. Both behaviors carry implications for a functioning society, as avoiding the news entirely can lead to lower levels of civic engagement and public knowledge.
These behaviors are frequently treated as stable traits, categorizing people as either constant news avoiders or loyal consumers of partisan media. But human behavior is rarely so static. People might feel motivated to read the news during major political events but choose to tune out when the headlines become upsetting or challenge their worldview. When people encounter information that contradicts their core values, they experience a form of psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. To restore mental balance, an individual might actively avoid the source of that discomfort or seek out information that reassures them.
A team of researchers led by Michael Heseltine, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, investigated whether news consumption fluctuates based on immediate political developments. Heseltine, along with political scientists Hennes Barnehl at the University of California San Diego and Magdalena Wojcieszak at the University of California Davis, proposed a concept they call partisan temporal selective avoidance.
They hypothesized that people dynamically adjust their news habits to avoid cognitive dissonance based on whether the current news cycle reflects poorly on their own political party or their opponents. The researchers wanted to know if partisans completely stop reading the news, switch to entertainment stories, or retreat to friendly news outlets when their party faces a scandal.
To test this idea, the researchers analyzed the online browsing histories in a large study of 2,462 adult internet users in the United States over a nine-month period in 2019. The dataset included more than 27 million individual web visits, which the researchers filtered using a comprehensive list of over 5,000 national and local news domains. The researchers used machine learning tools to categorize the visited news articles. They distinguished between hard news, which covers politics and economics, and soft news, which covers topics like local crime, sports, and entertainment.
To accurately assess the political tone of millions of articles, the researchers built two automated text classifiers. They trained these machine learning models using thousands of social media posts from mainstream news organizations like The Associated Press and Reuters. Human coders manually labeled a subset of these posts to teach the software how to identify negative sentiment toward Republican or Democratic politicians. Once trained, the software scanned the titles of the articles in the participants’ browsing histories to determine the political tone of each visit.
The research team evaluated the data on two levels. First, they conducted a macro-level analysis to see how the overall daily news environment affected reading habits. They assigned a daily sentiment score based on whether the dominant news stories of the day were negative toward Democrats or Republicans. By averaging the sentiment of major news coverage over a rolling three-day period, the researchers created a snapshot of the general political climate. Then, they compared these daily scores to the actual browsing behaviors of the study participants.
On this daily level, the researchers found that partisans reacted to unfavorable news cycles in different ways. When the daily news environment was negative toward their own party, Democrats did not decrease their overall news consumption. Instead, they reduced their consumption of hard news, pivoting toward soft news topics. When the news was negative toward Republicans, Democrats consumed more news articles overall.
Republicans exhibited a different pattern in response to the daily news cycle. When the news was negative toward their own party, Republicans slightly increased their overall news consumption. However, this increase was primarily driven by a shift toward ideologically aligned, conservative news outlets. When the daily news cycle was negative toward Democrats, Republicans did not make statistically significant changes to their news consumption.
The researchers also conducted a micro-level analysis to see what happens within an individual browsing session after a person reads a specific article. They tracked users sequentially to measure the immediate effect of reading a negative political story. This allowed the team to see if encountering an unfavorable headline prompted users to abandon the news entirely or seek out different types of content in real time.
At this granular level, reading a negative article about one’s own party reduced the length of the remaining news browsing session. For both Democrats and Republicans, encountering a story that cast their preferred party in a negative light made them more likely to stop reading the news shortly afterward. If Democrats were browsing a mainstream or non-aligned outlet and encountered an unfavorable article, they were slightly more likely to switch to a left-leaning outlet for the remainder of their session. Republicans also exhibited an increase in reading negative news about their own party after an initial exposure, though this often occurred on ideologically aligned platforms.
Encountering negative news about the opposing party also shaped subsequent behavior. For Democrats, reading an article negative toward Republicans slightly decreased the length of their overall reading session. Yet for both groups, exposure to a negative story about the opposition prompted them to seek out a higher proportion of hard news and additional negative news stories before they closed their browsers. This suggests that reading bad news about a political rival can be highly engaging, motivating partisans to dive deeper into political coverage.
The study relies on browsing data from 2019, a period dominated by the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. During this time, the overall news environment was consistently more negative toward Republicans than Democrats. The differences in how Democrats and Republicans adjusted their reading habits might reflect the specific political dynamics of that year rather than permanent psychological differences between the two groups. Future research will need to examine whether these specific partisan differences persist under different political administrations.
The findings are based solely on desktop and laptop web browsing. This data collection method misses news consumed via smartphones, television broadcasts, print media, and radio. As a result, the study captures only a portion of the participants’ total media diets. The research also focuses entirely on the two-party political system of the United States. It remains unknown how people in countries with multiparty systems adjust their news consumption when faced with unfavorable coverage of their preferred political groups.
The study, “Partisan temporal selective news avoidance: Evidence from online trace data,” was authored by Michael Heseltine, Hennes Barnehl, and Magdalena Wojcieszak.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-partisans-change-their-news-habits-when-the-headlines-look-bad/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PartisanTemporalSelectiveAvoidance #NewsConsumption #SelectiveExposure #NewsAvoidance #CognitiveDissonance #PoliticalNewsBehavior #Democrats #Republicans #MediaConsumption #PoliticalPsychology
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More and more people are tuning the news out: 'Now I don't have that anxiety
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2025/sep/01/news-avoidance-high-anxiety
#HackerNews #newsavoidance #anxiety #relief #mentalhealth #media #literacy #selfcare
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#Media #Journalism #News #NewsAvoidance: "Q. How many people avoid the news in the United States?
A. According to this year’s Digital News Report, up to 43% say they avoid the news in some form. It doesn’t mean that 43% of the country is not consuming any news at all. But it’s a sign of a clear decline in interest in news. There is a smaller group of people that we call consistent news avoiders. They consume news less often than once a month or never, and this group is around 8% of the US public, which is still millions of people.
Q. Who are these news avoiders in the US?
A. A lot of things are similar across countries. These people are more likely to be younger and working-class and less likely to be college-educated. They are also slightly more likely to be women than men. Lack of interest in politics is a huge predictor, so people who are consuming little to no news (or avoiding news often) are less interested in politics and less likely to participate in political life.
But here’s one of the things that’s different about the US. In addition to those patterns, you also have a larger segment of people who are on the right ideologically and who are also avoiding news, and part of what they are expressing is dissatisfaction with conventional sources of journalism.
Q. What are the reasons they give for avoiding the news?
A. It’s a mix of things. There’s a set of people who emphasise that it’s not about the news at all, but about the structural barriers in their lives. They just feel like they don’t have time to focus on the news because they are taking care of three kids and an ageing parent and working full time, and it feels too exhausting to make time for the news at the end of the day.
But there’s another segment of people who emphasise that it’s about the news itself, and here it’s a mix of things ranging from an emphasis on how anxiety-inducing the news itself can be to frustrations with sensationalism..."
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#News #Media #Journalism #NewsAvoidance: "Interest in news avoidance has recently grown both inside and outside academia. In this introduction to a special issue on the topic, we present a systematic review of existing studies (N = 116) and discuss what we (don’t) know about this phenomenon. Our review illustrates that news avoidance has been examined through qualitative, mixed, but most often quantitative studies, conducted primarily in Western countries, although with important exceptions. We highlight how existing literature portrays news avoidance as a multidimensional phenomenon—encompassing behavioral and expressive components—affected by factors at the levels of the (missing) audiences, the news content, and the broader structural context. In terms of blind spots, we know relatively much about causes for news avoidance and some of its consequences, but less about counterstrategies. Also, while much of our knowledge is centered around audiences, we know little about the roles of other actors, such as the news media, journalists, and intermediaries. We end by discussing what the research field can learn by studying news avoidance, highlighting the value of understanding how audiences relate to journalism through a diverse set of methodological approaches. We also stress the need to carefully consider normative assumptions when positioning news avoidance as a problem." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2024.2393131#abstract
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#Journalism #Media #News #TV #Newspapers #NewsAvoidance: "A few serious news media will survive as special-interest publications, like ham-radio magazines in bygone days. Their content is mostly argued about by well-educated men with polarised views, notes the Reuters Institute. Politicians will disproportionately woo this group, ignoring the apathetic mainstream.
The no-news era will change politics. “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be,” wrote the American founding father Thomas Jefferson. Expect rising abstention at elections, as is already happening in France. Polarisation pushed turnout in the US’s 2020 election to 66 per cent, the highest since 1908, but that should prove a peak. Internet influencers may displace TV personalities such as Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy as election-winners. And with citizens losing interest, leaders will find it easier to dismantle democracy à la Viktor Orbán.
We marvel at Russians, switched off and immobilised while their government commits horrors. That could be us very soon." https://www.ft.com/content/451e7466-7a91-4784-aa37-02993ff0fc9e
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#News #Media #Journalism #Newspapers #NewsAvoidance: "Let us start with news content and the way it is presented. News avoidance is not only a response to content. But make no mistake: content is still a big part of the problem. When so many people explain their news avoidance by saying, “it’s not me, it’s news,” a first response should be to look closely at the coverage that turns them off.
Many people – and not just consistent news avoiders – say that news is depressing, irrelevant, unintelligible, and that there isn’t anything they can do about the problems they see in the news anyway. These complaints are a starting point for meeting people where they are culturally. If our goal is to address consistent news avoidance, it fundamentally does not matter whether these beliefs are fair or accurate. What matters is the social fact that millions of people hold these views, and that these preconceptions lead some to systematically avoid the news, and many others to approach it only hesitantly.
It does not have to be this way. A news organisation that wanted to could say, “we hear you.” It could differentiate itself from an abundance of relentlessly depressing news-as-usual by stating clearly and explicitly, “we want to be different,” and telling people –over time, showing people – that they are not afraid to lead with news that is uplifting, closer to people’s lived experience, presented in more accessible ways, and focused on things they can influence."
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"Some of these patterns are quite similar around the world. In general, consistent news avoidance tends to be more common among young people, women, and lower socioeconomic classes."
Read a longer excerpt from "Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism" (by Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen) in this @niemanlab post:
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/11/so-who-are-the-consistent-news-avoiders/
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CW: Opinion Piece
"And yet I sympathise with anyone who now reaches for the dial when the news comes on. I get the lure of avoidance, which is not the same as apathy." Rafael Behr
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I’ve been thinking why is it considered a negative thing a percentage of people are avoiding news to protect their mental health.
Mental health in America has long been ignored or dismissed and seems like cases are increasing.
For those who find the news affecting them in a negative way it seems disengagement from news should be met with understanding. Hopefully they can return in the future but mental health needs to be a priority.
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There is a long list of interesting pre- and post-conferences to #ica23, and some are still accepting abstracts. If I was planning to go to Toronto I would be torn between attending these two, both arranged by such nice and smart scholars:
Key themes in disconnection research - deadline Jan 20th
https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/projects/digital-disconnection/events/conferences/-ica-preconference-toronto-key-themes-in-digital-disconnection-studies.htmlNews avoidance, resistance, and related audience practices - deadline Jan 27th
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news-avoidance-resistance-and-related-audience-practices-definitions-predictors-and-consequences -
A #commodon #introduction: I am a professor of #mediastudies doing qualitative audience research. With my colleagues in Bergen Media Use Research Group I have studied cross-media use and public connection in Norway. Then projects on #digitaldisconnection, #newsavoidance, #doomscrolling, media and #climatechange. Interested in #algorithms, #datafication and #smartphones, from a user perspective. My new book Media Use in Digital Everyday Life will be published #openaccess by Emerald in 2023.
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/5 #GuteNachrichten[?]
Was darf in meinen Kopf?
"Überall schlechte Nachrichten, digitale Überforderung, Dauerstress im Alltag: Manchmal hilft gegen das Durchdrehen schon ein einziges Wort."
Längerer Artikel:
:mastoread:
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.zeit.de/2022/44/oliver-burkeman-aussortieren-stress-konzentration
