With war in Ukraine following hot on the heels of the Covid crisis, the news over the past few years has been heavy, to say the least. As such, news avoidance has been a relatively common tactic, whether on a temporary or even permanent basis.

A recent paper from the University of Jyväskylä examines the topic across news consumers in Argentina, Japan, Israel, Finland, and the United States.

News avoidance

The study finds that news avoidance is not purely done for personal reasons but also has temporal and sociocultural factors involved. The researchers find two main factors that influence whether we avoid the news or not: emotional and cognitive. Cognitive factors cover things such as country-specific and contextual issues, whereas emotional factors were more common across the viewers in different countries.

For instance, a good example of cognitive avoidance was during the period of the Trump administration in the United States. The researchers found that Trump’s continual presence in the news made people turn off because they were sick of seeing and hearing about him. A similar reaction was found in Israel to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A feature of cognitive news avoidance is that it is seldom permanent because it’s usually linked to a particular event, period of time, or individual. As such, the authors believe that both the war and the pandemic will probably fall into this category and cause cognitive news avoidance.

By contrast, emotional news avoidance is a far more permanent state of affairs and is typically caused by the negative nature of news coverage. As news typically covers wars, accidents, natural disasters, and other unpleasant things, people can choose to tune out to avoid the distress it causes.

Emotional news avoidance goes beyond news fatigue and also produces emotions such as fear, disgust, and sadness. As a result, emotional news avoidance is often much more to do with self-protection from the emotional strain caused by the news. This was found to be especially common among younger people.