Abstract
This article comparatively examines news avoidance in a rapidly changing media environment. We utilize findings from a large dataset of 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers, conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US. We aim to make a contribution to the study of news avoidance by providing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the drivers, practices, and patterns of news avoidance as they occur in and are shaped by a variety of national contexts. We argue that news avoidance is shaped not only by individual characteristics, but is also manifested and performed as part of specific time frames and socio-cultural factors. We distinguish two drivers of intentional news avoidance: cognitive and emotional. The cognitive drivers are accentuated by distinct country-level contextual factors, whereas the emotional drivers for news avoidance are shared across diverse national contexts.
Highlights
Digital platforms and technologies are expanding the ways in which audiences can consume news (Choi 2016; Edgerly 2017; Hermida 2016)
The first is a set of cognitive drivers that mainly refers to a repetition of high-profile news items, which in turn leads to a sense of overload
We have moved beyond the common scholarly focus on the individual motivations for news avoidance and demonstrated that some aspects of news avoidance, namely, a set of cognitive drivers represent distinct country-level contextual factors, cultures of news consumption (Toff and Kalogeropoulos 2020), and are more situational (Skovsgaard and Andersen 2020), whereas certain emotional drivers for news avoidance are shared across diverse national contexts
Summary
Digital platforms and technologies are expanding the ways in which audiences can consume news (Choi 2016; Edgerly 2017; Hermida 2016). With mobile devices and social media platforms, news consumption is interspersed throughout the day without the predictability that characterized access to media in the times of print newspapers and broadcast news (Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, and Matassi 2018; Hermida 2020). People regularly use a variety of media and make decisions about what news to engage with (Ha et al 2018; Peters and Schrøder 2018). This includes active choices to bypass certain news outlets, or for some, avoid the news media altogether. In the digital media environment users have to make less
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