Media and society

Britons are increasingly avoiding the news

Brexit and the pandemic have taken a toll on the British public

Aug 22nd 2020

Every year Ofcom, the media regulator, conducts research into where Britons
get their news. And every year, the answer is roughly the same: mostly from
television, decreasingly so from newspapers and more and more from social
media. But this year’s “news consumption report” contained a surprise: after
years of growth, the number of British adults getting their news from social
media declined from 49% to 45%. People’s opinion of social media deteriorated
too. Brits consider it the least accurate, trustworthy, impartial or high quality of
all sources.

One reason for the decline is the way social-media sites work. Facebook, the
most popular, has been demoting news in users’ feeds. Publishers reacted to
that by deprioritising Facebook as an outlet to promote their work, notes Alice
Pickthall of Enders Analysis, a research firm. Moreover many websites have
erected paywalls, reducing the supply of high-quality free content on social
networks.
But a more important cause may be that Britons are tiring of the news and
actively choosing to avoid it. Research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism (risj) in Oxford found that last year some 35% of Britons said they
often or sometimes avoided the news, up from 24% in 2017. The big jump is
probably because of polarisation around Brexit, reckons Rasmus Nielsen, risj’s
director. Benjamin Toff of the University of Minnesota has found that “people
who relied on social media as their main source of news were significantly more
likely to say they were actively avoiding news”. In Britain women and those on
the left are also likelier to avoid news. In research on Britain and Spain, Mr Toff
found that one of the main reasons for news avoidance was that “the content
was too focused on politics”.

The pandemic has changed the reason, but not the trend. Ofcom’s surveys were
conducted mostly before Britain entered lockdown. Subsequent research by the
regulator found that the use of social media as a source of news about
coronavirus fell from 49% in week one to 29% in week 20. The number of
people saying they were trying to avoid news about coronavirus rose from 22%
in the first week of lockdown to 35% in the tenth week, at the end of May, before
declining to 29% in early August, probably because the virus had stopped
dominating the headlines. Research by the risj found a similar pattern. The
main reason for avoiding news? “It has a bad effect on my mood”.