In a global poll, the figures showed an increase as people moved away because of reasons such as depression, news fatigue, or boring coverage.
According to a Digital News Report commissioned by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute and conducted by polling company YouGov, 39 percent of the 71,805 participants admitted they sometimes or often avoid the news. That’s up from 29% last year.
Coming to a conclusion would be that events such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East may potentially be driving people away from the news. The study was done during the months of January and February this year, and it had responses from 94,943 adults across 47 countries.
It’s a different story in some countries: upcoming elections in several countries have driven greater interest in news. Overall, though, interest in news has declined markedly. Only 46% of respondents said they were “very” or “extremely interested” in the news, down from 63% in 2017. In the UK, news interest has almost halved since 2015.
The lead author of the report, Nick Newman, noted that recent news topics – being a pandemic of COVID-19 and multiple wars – have made it an exceptionally hard read for its audience. “People are naturally disengaging with the news, either to preserve their mental health or really concentrate on getting things done in their daily lives,” Newman told BBC News. He also added that for some people, reading certain news invokes a feeling of helplessness, so they tend to purposely avoid some topics.
Many said they were overwhelmed by massive loads of news, or were even sometimes disgusted with politics. Women and younger people were more likely to be wearied by the deluge of news.
Although total trust in news holds at 40%, this is still 4 points below the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK, trust in news has increased slightly to 36% in the past year, but it is still 15 points lower than before the 2016 Brexit referendum.
The most trustworthy news brand in the UK is still BBC News, followed by Channel 4 and ITV.
TikTok Now More Popular as a News Source in the UK than X
The study highlighted a shift away from relatively traditional news sources, such as television and print. In the UK, 73% of respondents receive news via the Internet, while 50% receive it from TV and only 14% through print media.
Facebook still trails only YouTube in importance among users for the provision of news but less so than before. More users now turn to YouTube and WhatsApp for news rather than to Facebook but, for the first time since 2016, TikTok has overtaken X. The proportion of people who get their news from TikTok is larger than that using X, currently at 13% against 10%. Meanwhile, use for news on TikTok is even higher among 18 to 24-year-olds globally at 23%.
The rise of video, particularly in the form of short news clips, has now made it the dominant online platform for news among the young. Increasingly, consumers are coming to expect availability of a sweep of related topics covered in video form, he said. While traditional news outlets still remain devoted to text-based reporting, transitioning to this trend in media use is difficult. The report also found that podcasts have emerged as the one good news for publishers but these are again dominated by the most educated contingent. There may be a silver lining for journalists: even with the most serious of topics, like politics and war, the public harbors skepticism about just how far artificial intelligence will actually be integrated into newscasting. The report indicates AI is more acceptable when it aids journalistic effort through transcription and translation rather than replacing journalists altogether.
