The phenomenon has been known for at least a decade and has kept media owners up at night. Researchers have coined the term “news avoidance” and, as researchers do, they are trying to understand what is happening. A recent report by the Reuters Institute devotes considerable space to this problem. It turns out that, globally, a staggering 38% of those asked respond that they actively avoid the news. The same index was less than 30% five years ago. If things go at this rate, in the next decade half of humanity will say “no” to news. Unless something changes. The question is – what?

Recently, a liberal American journalist published a text in The Washington Post in which she admitted to the “shameful truth”, i.e. that she had stopped reading newspapers and watching news programmes. She was annoyed by the news and felt battered because of it, and was unable to write anything original herself, and so she went – as befits a true American – to see a psychotherapist. She was advised to – brace yourselves! – sit down and stop consuming the news.

The therapist felt that the daily immersion in what is now scientifically known as the Infosphere (it should be noted that the journalist took no prisoners and her daily morning menu included the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, muted CNN was permanently on in the office and she listened to NPR news radio in the shower...) was taking a toll on her mental health and the only advice was to stop the flow of the toxic substance.

When I read this, I began to wonder about myself. For how long have I been reading mere headlines to get a rough idea of the current subject of public debate, not delving into the content of texts if I don’t have to? For a long time. I think I have become a therapist for myself. And yet I deal with information professionally.

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  I started out as an amateur, back in communist times, when I experienced the perverse pleasure of interacting with Trybuna Ludu [the People’s Tribune] and other party newspapers, trying to read from them what would happen and when the System would finally collapse. At that time, I also got to know the feeling of being “battered” that the American described. It involved situations where I crossed the fine line between reading between the lines and reading (or listening) to what was written (or said). When I took the pulp journalism served up by the communist media seriously and tried to consume it like normal press, I got a kind of “cerebral indigestion”.

I then had to wait and go back to treating the broadcast as an object of study. You could say that once you put on an intellectual gas mask and rubber gloves, you could cope even with the communist media, and the immortal beginning of every “Wieczór z Dziennikiem” [Evening with the Daily], which read: “First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party Comrade Edward Gierek” was transformed into a simple message – “same old”.

When the Prime Minister or the Politburo appeared in the headline, you had to lend an ear, because you knew immediately that something was going on. Equipped with such knowledge, which I developed and fostered, I survived until the end of the People’s Republic (PRL).

After 1989, I threw myself like a man possessed by all the news that flowed from the media and it became my natural environment. Sometimes they annoyed me, offended me with their unprofessionalism, bias, selectivity and all the sins from which our media were not free, but I was glad they were there and I immersed myself in them with joy: from “Życie” to Urban’s “Nie”, from “Polityka” to “Najwyższy Czas”, I wallowed in the words and the news they created.

Then the internet came along and at some point I felt cornered. I could no longer reach for the newspaper at a time of my choosing, sitting down comfortably and sipping on coffee. Now the newspaper (or rather something that had ceased to be a newspaper anymore, but had turned into a multi-headed hybrid of multiple media) was reaching for me. It emerged from everywhere, hidden under many pseudonyms, and only wanted me to spend time with it, as much time as possible, and I felt like Catherine Blum, whose life had also been taken over by a newspaper at one point.

Then I started to pick and choose. An old joke from times long gone tells of a man who, every morning after his morning walk, would go into a newsagent’s, pick up a newspaper, look at its front page and put it down without buying it. After a while, the newsagent asked him, intrigued, what he was looking for. – An obituary – the man laconically replied. When the newsagent told him that obituaries were towards the end of the newspaper, the man replied: – The one I am waiting for will be on the front page.

You could say that the guy in the joke was one of the forerunners of the selective news avoidance approach. When an onslaught of information cannot be avoided, we instinctively look for the one, the most important one. In this way, we maintain the fiction of participating in the media exchange and no one can accuse us of isolating ourselves, but at the same time we free ourselves from the whole stream of news that – as in the case of this American journalist – can be harmful to us.

This liberation can take many forms. Sometimes there is an oversaturation caused by an oversupply of news about some person or phenomenon. This is the case with news about Donald Trump. Regardless of whether the captive audience supports him or not, they do not want to hear about him as often.

A young woman quoted by a group of US researchers said that she had decided to take a “holiday” from the news because every time she came across another news item about Trump, she could no longer stand it because it was too “heavy”. One might think that the issue was that they carried a powerful emotional charge and did not actually contain information, but rather projections of the authors’ idiosyncrasies, or a mixture of both.

In Israel, such a figure was Benjamin Netanyahu, who filled all the news bulletins from morning to evening with his powerful personality; in Russia it is Putin, of course, and in Poland – if such research were done – it would probably turn out that their equivalent is the Kaczyński-Tusk tandem. In this case, the principle of “there is no such thing as bad publicity” does not work to one’s advantage, because an overabundance of information, regardless of its label, causes the audience to flee.

It is also amusing to note that – because the world of information is global – something of a butterfly effect can be observed: the turning up the heat on certain topics by American journalists could cause a crisis among audiences in Finland, for example. The same researchers quote a Finn who could not stand the flurry of news about the US Supreme Court and reacted by refusing to receive any news about the United States.

A classic example of the phenomenon of oversaturation is the case of the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, everyone was looking for information about it. They started their day with internet searches to reassure themselves that it was better than the previous day or that they are better than their neighbours. They learned what the “R value” was, what the transmission of the virus was, what actually made it dangerous, how to detect it, how to cure it.

Then we became indifferent. Largely because there was a lot of misinformation and it was really difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood. But more so, I think, because we had the feeling that so little depended on us and the daily reminder of how powerless we were drove us into deep sadness. It was as if a virus had taken over not only our bodies but also our minds, with a daily dose of it being delivered to us by the media.

However, the media must be defended here, because reporting on the pandemic made perfect social sense. After all, it was a widespread danger and – at least in the beginning – everyone wanted the information to reach them. Even the Confederation party activists benefited, although not necessarily as much as the rest of the citizens. Indifference came later.

However, there are categories of news that overwhelm, create a sense of powerlessness, while offering little or nothing in return. This is the whole gamut of disaster news. What does it do for us to get news that there has been a train collision in India and a hundred people have died in it? Will the safety on Indian railways improve as a result of our action? Or what use can we make of the news that a hundred thousand chickens burned in a poultry farm fire?

In either case, we will only be confronted with horrific images of train carriages and bleeding bodies or burning animals with no chance of escape, which, thanks to our imagination, will remind us so much of burning people. And since, according to a well-known media saying, one picture is worth a thousand words, the media will not let us off the hook without images, which will more or less literally appear on all the screens that come into our field of vision.

That is why it is hard not to understand a Finnish waitress who said that at weekends she swaps her smartphone for an old Nokia, which is a phone only, in order to physically fence herself off from news that might disturb her rest. I know people who do this not only at weekends and in this way try to control aggressive news.

This aspiration sometimes takes forms that may seem a bit infantile. Another Finnish woman, depressed that there was too much negativity in the news, told the interviewer that she would prefer to see something nice on the news: brave dogs or little pandas. What she did not realise was that these images would essentially belong to the same category as disaster news, they could be called unnecessary news, and the only (but crucia;) difference would be the nice feelings they leave the viewers with.

Arguably, it is this desire that is behind the fact that social media is filled with images of kittens and doggos and videos of strangely behaving animals circulate the internet as viral videos with unstoppable force. As far as I’m concerned, cats and dogs annoy me equally to burning poultry, because in both cases I don’t see any benefit in showing them to myself as a viewer who invests his precious time in watching them. And my intuition tells me (and I’m probably not alone) that a cognitive benefit should accompany every moment spent in front of the screen, because after all, we have so few of them in our lives…

The phenomenon of deliberate news avoidance is, of course, also related to the credibility of the news, or rather the lack thereof. Almost a third of Reuters respondents worldwide said that their decision to avoid news was motivated by media bias. The same report brought the shocking news that the former icon of journalism, the UK’s BBC, is trusted by only 55% of the British public, and that this trust has fallen precipitously from 75% over the past four years.

The report does not comment on the reasons, but gives information from which we can piece together the whole picture. Well, the majority of those who distrust the BBC are Conservative voters who supported Brexit. Given the corporation’s strong tilt to the side of the opponents of Britain’s exit from the European Union, it is not surprising that supporters of this step felt let down and stopped trusting an institution that has a clause in its charter about impartiality and for many years (rightly or not) was regarded as its global benchmark…

The American journalist I started with, Amanda Ripley, the one whose therapist recommended avoiding news, decided to tackle the phenomenon from a slightly different angle than media researchers – to answer the question of what is actually missing from the media products whose consumption is harming and whose consumption is being refused by a growing audience, i.e. what people really expect from news. In other words: what could journalists do to ensure that their work is not rejected. The diagnosis was surprisingly simple and, in the world of journalism, especially American predatory news journalism, sounded downright naïve.

In her view, people are looking for three things: hope, a sense of empowerment, and dignity. She illustrated the latter with the story of how, for several hours, she walked alongside participants in an anti-abortion demonstration, i.e. among people whose views should, according to her fellow professionals, be mocked or condemned, and instead of behaving as she usually does, i.e. pulling out her distorting mirror in which to show the people with whom she disagrees, she spent that time talking, trying to understand them. It was, she wrote, more human for her.

One could mock her discovery by saying that she could hear similar ideas in any church if she wanted to go to one (well, maybe not every church), but that is not the point. The dilemma before us demands an answer to the question of whether the delivery of information is to be an exchange between people, or taking people’s time to spend in front of a screen. Big media companies are carefully reading reports like this one from the Reuters Institute and are coming up with ways to ensure that audiences don’t abandon news, because their livelihoods depend on it. Algorithms select information for us in such a way as to keep our attention for as long as possible. So perhaps in the not-too-distant future we will have even more fluffy cats and unhappy dogs (or vice versa) on our smartphone screens. Perhaps companies will come up with other ideas. In that case, however, we (that is, our time) will always be treated like a commodity. And this treatment is perhaps the most important reason for the escape from the media. So it’s time for a fair deal: we will read, and you treat us like people. So? De we have a deal?

– Robert Bogdański

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

– Translated by jz

SOURCES
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022/dnr-executive-summary

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21670811.2021.1904266

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/how-to-fix-news-media/

https://www.amandaripley.com/