But something changed during the pandemic. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was the news itself.
“I’ve always felt I had a responsibility to know everything,” she says. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”the world — was once the news industry’s ideal customer. Now, she may be its biggest nightmare. by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. For years, the Oxford-based think tank has been asking people around the world about their news-consumption habits. In its latest survey, 38 percent of U.S.
“I may glance at the headlines, but I can’t handle the stress put on me when I go to the front page,” she says. “What I find is, the news is depressing. It feels like it affects me directly. I don’t know if the world is worse now than it was before. But it never used to feel like a personal threat. Maybe I just feel it more.”
News avoidance appears to be rising just as local media is falling deeper into crisis, with hundreds of local news sources — especially weekly newspapers that serve small towns — shuttering in recent years. In part, this reflects the realities of a world filled with violence, privation, disease and human-made atrocities. But there are deeper evolutionary reasons for why people give priority to negative news, according to. The preference for it serves as a kind of survival strategy, a warning system about imminent threats.