Bad News Overload? News Avoidance on the Rise

These days more than ever, it often feels like there’s no end to bad news. In the age of social media and constant exposure to news, doom scrolling can take a heavy toll on people’s mental wellbeing. As a consequence, more and more people actively try to avoid the news or at least limit their exposure to it.

According to the Reuters Institute’s latest Digital News Report, an average of 42 percent of respondents from 48 countries included in the survey said that they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, a significant increase from 29 percent in 2017, when the question was first asked. As the following chart shows, selective news avoidance, as the Reuters Institute calls it, became significantly more widespread across all markets in recent years, with half of all respondents from the United Kingdom and 45 percent of U.S. respondents making an effort to reduce their news intake.

The Reuters Institute finds that news avoidance is often linked with low trust in the news and that there are generally two types of news avoiders: consistent avoiders who typically have low education levels and little to no interest in the news and selective avoiders who struggle with news overload and try to insulated themselves from certain topic to protect their mental wellbeing.