‘I’ll Hear About It Eventually.’ So-called news avoiders aren’t really skipping out on the news
The news is depressing and stressful and many people avoid it. But these news avoiders get their news secondhand, writes Mary Retta at Columbia Journalism Review:
This can involve hearing about the news from friends or family, or “seeing discussions of things that happened in the news on Facebook describing ‘that thing that Trump said’”—that is, indirect exposure, [says Benjamin Toff—an associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and the author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism.] “After all, you need to be exposed to news often to be able to actively avoid it.” …. So-called news avoiders are, he argued, for the most part still regularly consuming information: “What makes them news avoiders is having this experience of regularly avoiding it, but that isn’t the same thing as screening out news altogether from their lives.