Taking a Break from News: A Five-nation Study of News Avoidance in the Digital Era

Mikko Villi; Tali Aharoni; Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt; Pablo J. Boczkowski; Kaori Hayashi; Eugenia Mitchelstein; Akira Tanaka; Neta Kligler-Vilenchik

doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.1904266

Taking a Break from News: A Five-nation Study of News Avoidance in the Digital Era

Mikko Villi^*, Tali Aharoni, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Pablo J. Boczkowski, Kaori Hayashi, Eugenia Mitchelstein, Akira Tanaka, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Communication and Journalism

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

This article comparatively examines news avoidance in a rapidly changing media environment. We utilize findings from a large dataset of 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers, conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US. We aim to make a contribution to the study of news avoidance by providing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the drivers, practices, and patterns of news avoidance as they occur in and are shaped by a variety of national contexts. We argue that news avoidance is shaped not only by individual characteristics, but is also manifested and performed as part of specific time frames and socio-cultural factors. We distinguish two drivers of intentional news avoidance: cognitive and emotional. The cognitive drivers are accentuated by distinct country-level contextual factors, whereas the emotional drivers for news avoidance are shared across diverse national contexts.

Original language	American English
Pages (from-to)	148-164
Number of pages	17
Journal	Digital Journalism
Volume	10
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1904266
State	Published - 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 17H01833, and Global Partnership Fund of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University. The authors would like to thank Aysha Agbarya, Victoria Andelsman, Adi Aricha, Tomás Bombau, Sofía Carcavallo, Silvina Chmiel, Rodrigo Gil Buetto, Rosario Giqueaux, Camila Giuliano, Hadas Gur-Zeev, Anni Juusola, Kateryna Kasianenko, Hiroki Kato, Zhang Lei, Silvana Leiva, Mora Matassi, Chie Matsumoto, Pilar Passon, Jeanette Rodriguez, Amy Ross Arguedas, Salla Salminen, Hadassah Schwarz, Asako Shimizu, Orly Tokov, Celeste Wagner, and Maaya Yui, who worked as research assistants for this project.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

News avoidance
audiences
cross-national research
journalism
news consumption
qualitative research

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10.1080/21670811.2021.1904266

Cite this

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abstract = "This article comparatively examines news avoidance in a rapidly changing media environment. We utilize findings from a large dataset of 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers, conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the US. We aim to make a contribution to the study of news avoidance by providing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the drivers, practices, and patterns of news avoidance as they occur in and are shaped by a variety of national contexts. We argue that news avoidance is shaped not only by individual characteristics, but is also manifested and performed as part of specific time frames and socio-cultural factors. We distinguish two drivers of intentional news avoidance: cognitive and emotional. The cognitive drivers are accentuated by distinct country-level contextual factors, whereas the emotional drivers for news avoidance are shared across diverse national contexts.",

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Taking a Break from News: A Five-nation Study of News Avoidance in the Digital Era

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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