Avoiding the news to participate in society? The longitudinal relationship between news avoidance and civic engagement

News avoidance and its societal consequences

While there is an abundance of media outlets and online platforms that make news accessible to citizens, in some societies we see sizable numbers of people avoiding (certain types of) news more regularly or avoiding established news altogether. People can either actively avoid the news or have low levels of news use, without actively avoiding it (Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2019). In contrast to other studies that clustered users into groups with distinct media diets (e. g., Edgerly et al., 2018; Ksiazek, Malthouse, and Webster, 2010), our study understands news avoidance as an active behavior that can differ in its frequency. This means that we do not make a binary distinction between who is a news avoider or not but are instead interested in the outcomes of news avoidance.

The reasons for intentional news avoidance can vary from not trusting the news, the overload of information available, or issue fatigue (Gurr and Metag, 2021). During Covid-19, as a recent study found, the main motivations for avoidance were feelings of information overload and being unable to do anything about the crisis (De Bruin, de Haan, Vliegenthart, Kruikemeier, and Boukes, 2021). News avoidance is thereby closely related to the Uses and Gratifications Approach (Katz et al., 1973), as we understand audiences to have an active role when it comes to the selection of news. Hence, people may have been intentionally avoiding news more often since the outbreak of Covid-19, because news seeking did not present them with the expected gratifications. In times of crisis, people that intentionally avoid news report being more often tired of getting negative news or that they feel increasingly helpless in turning the crisis situation around (Fletcher et al., 2020). Regular news avoidance may lead to disengaged citizens or foster polarization of opinion and knowledge between citizens who do and those who do not avoid news, which can lead to a disbalance in representative democracies (Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg, 2012). However, so far, little is known about the specific relation between intentional news avoidance and civic engagement. This is especially true for the avoidance of a specific news topic during times of crisis. We will therefore investigate how the active behavior of avoiding the news about a crisis topic relates to civic engagement in activities related to the crisis.

Civic engagement in times of crisis

Civic engagement is an important way for citizens to influence society by supporting political causes, criticizing them, or suggesting new directions (Strömbäck, 2005). During a crisis, pro-social civic engagement can be especially vital in attenuating negative outcomes, as governments need to rely on an active citizenry to help them steer the country through the crisis and compensate for lacking manpower and resources (Boersma, Kraiukhina, Larruina, Lehota, and Nury, 2019). Hence, active support from citizens can help to mitigate political challenges more successfully (Kornberg and Clarke, 1992).

Civic engagement – defined as goal-oriented, often case-specific, voluntary activity by citizens – can entail a number of different activities (Theocharis and Van Deth, 2016; Zukin, Keeter, Andolina, Jenkings, and Carpini, 2006), such as volunteering, donating, and expressing public opinion. Yet, during a crisis citizens may not be able to engage in all activities, for example, if larger gatherings are prohibited (Pleyers, 2020). We, therefore, focus on the civic engagement in pro-social activities that were possible during the Covid-19 crisis.

The role of news avoidance for civic engagement

Media can play a key role in sparking civic engagement. The positive relationship between political media use and citizen’s political activity over time is well established and often explained by higher levels of political interest, knowledge, civic awareness, and efficacy (Andersen et al., 2021). This, in turn, may influence participation, with recent studies showing causal evidence for this relationship (e. g., Andersen et al., 2021; Kruikemeier and Shehata, 2017). Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens.

Research on the Covid-19 crisis has shown that news media are a key source of information that citizens increasingly turn to; however, the longer the crisis lasts, the more people tend to avoid the news (Fletcher et al., 2020; Ohme et al., 2020). Conducting correlation analyses, scholars found low levels of civic engagement and political participation for the group with the lowest levels of media exposure in a survey sample, whom they termed “news avoiders” (Edgerly, 2017; Edgerly et al., 2018). However, the causal relationship between actively avoiding news and civic engagement remains unclear. Also, much uncertainty exists about what actively avoiding news about the crisis means for citizens’ engagement to attenuate outcomes of the crisis. This is important to understand, as active civic engagement helps people to cope with the crisis and increases social cohesion among its citizens, which will contribute to society at large, especially during a crisis period. Research on the causal relationship between news avoidance and civic engagement is sparse (see e. g., Ksiazek, Malthouse, and Webster, 2010) and, therefore, we propose two scenarios.

Less news, less engagement

In this first scenario, the decision to avoid news leads to lower levels of engagement, mainly for the reasons outlined above and based on the literature on news consumption. Citizens that do turn away from news experience the same situation as citizens that have general low news-seeking routines: Their political interest is lower, they know less about political developments, suffer from lower political efficacy, and, as a consequence, participate less (Shehata and Strömbäck, 2018). In the case of issue-related news avoidance, it is possible that people will have lower interest in the topic, less knowledge, and feel less efficacious to act on this topic. Hence, as it leads to lower levels of news exposure on the topic, the effects of topic avoidance would be similar to those of general news avoidance. As a result, issue-related news avoidance would lead to lower levels of issue-related engagement.

Less news, more engagement

However, in the second scenario, news avoidance could also coincide with higher levels of civic engagement. We believe that different reasons might cause this positive relationship. First, Putnam (2000) argued that media use can prevent citizens from acting together, as the increased time spent, in front of the television in particualr, can erode social capital and community goals. However, this argumentation has been criticized, and little empirical evidence has been found for the assumption (Hooghe, 2003; Norris, 2002). Given that avoiding news can be considered a result of a lack of gratifications in the news-seeking process, citizens may seek gratifications in activities beyond news exposure. Woodstock (2014), using qualitative interviews, found evidence that “news resisters”, with their consequential news avoidance, are very much committed to social and cultural issues and do actually practice engaged citizenship.

Second, in a crisis, people can actively avoid some news about the topic, while they still attend to other news, such as counter-attitudinal or perceived misinformation (e. g., Oyeyemi et al., 2014). Following a smaller number of news sources can be related to higher levels of political engagement (e. g., number of TV programs and participation, see Dilliplane, 2011, or news platforms and turnout, see Diehl, Barnidge, and Gil de Zuñiga, 2019). Hence, it is possible that with a more confined news diet, people are still informed about the crisis, however, just with information they perceive as correct, relevant to them, or easier to digest.

Third, people who do not actively seek news still report significant news encounters – often for the biggest news issues – mostly via their social networks in indirect, often incidental ways (e. g., Kaiser, Keller, and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2018; Toff and Nielsen, 2018). Hence, even with strong avoidance motivations, people come across news most likely via posts and messages shared on social media, private messaging applications, or other forms of interpersonal communication. The increase in relative importance of that information through incidental exposure can mobilize issue-related engagement (see Choi, Lee, and Metzgar, 2017; Johnson, Neo, Heijnen, Smits, and van Veen, 2020).

Taken together, while there is only little evidence that media use has detrimental effects on civic engagement – let alone that avoidance of news produces higher engagement in society –, they can still be valid in a situation in which news about a crisis topic is avoided. So far, however, the causal relation between news avoidance and civic engagement has received little attention. The goal of this study is a first investigation of this relationship for a specific news topic during times of crisis. We therefore ask:

Measures

Civic engagement was captured by the mean score of four items which asked people whether they took any of the following actions in the past three weeks, with answer categories ranging from 0 (not) to 4 (four or more times):

1. Donated money or goods to people or organizations affected by the coronavirus outbreak (M_wave1=.42, SD_wave1=.88; M_wave2=.44, SD_wave2=.88; M_wave3=.40, SD_wave3=.82; M_wave4=.32, SD_wave4=.76).

2. Posted or shared messages on social media with a clear call for action to comply with public-health measures in light of the coronavirus (M_wave1=.47, SD_wave1=1.06; M_wave2=.31, SD_wave2=.84; M_wave3=.21, SD_wave3=.68; M_wave4=.14, SD_wave4=.55).

3. Volunteered to help people or organizations that are affected by the coronavirus outbreak (M_wave1=.69, SD_wave1=1.21; M_wave2=.59, SD_wave2=1.13; M_wave3=.41, SD_wave3=.95; M_wave4=.32, SD_wave4=.83).

4. Personally convinced people they knew personally to follow official rules and be cautious in their behavior (M_wave1=1.93, SD_wave1=1.54; M_wave2=1.58, SD_wave2=1.47; M_wave3=1.31, SD_wave3=1.35; M_wave4=1.12, SD_wave4=1.30).

News avoidance was measured by a single item: Since the start of the Corona crisis I have avoided the news more often, with answer categories ranging from 1 (fully disagree) to 7 (fully agree) (M_wave1=2.59, SD_wave1=1.91; M_wave2=2.80, SD_wave2=1.94; M_wave3=2.82, SD_wave3=1.93; M_wave4=2.73, SD_wave4=1.92). People with higher education, females, and older citizens avoid news less often.

Limitations

Our study has important limitations to consider. It is a single-country study, and we cannot speak for the generalizability of the findings beyond the Netherlands. The findings emerged during the situation of a global pandemic and a country in crisis mode. Many people during the pandemic strongly relied on news media as a source of information (Ohme et al., 2020; van der Meer, 2018) and felt the strong urge to do something about the crisis situation (Waeterloos et al., 2021). While this may be a suitable moment to zoom into the relationship of news avoidance and civic engagement, future research needs to scrutinize our findings in different contexts. The specific context might make this study a most-likely case, as we focus on the avoidance of a specific news topic and behavioral outcomes that directly relate to this topic. Our measure of news avoidance is a straight-forward one and asked explicitly about the intentional decision to avoid news. While it serves the purpose of this study, future research should develop more nuanced measurements of news avoidance and re-test the relationship with civic engagement. Future research should also investigate indirect effects of this relationship. Finally, we only focus on a limited number of prosocial civic engagement activities due to the restriction of participation early on in the pandemic (Pleyers, 2020) and cannot speak for the relationship of news avoidance with types of participation that expressed discontent with government measures (such as the increasing number of protests during and after the field time of this study).

Twenty years after Bowling alone by Robert D. Putnam (2000) was published, the media environment has dramatically changed. While social media do connect citizens in new ways, this information ecology has led many citizens to follow news on their smartphones, social media platforms, and the still beloved television, to an extent probably higher than Putnam imagined back then. During a crisis, news is almost unavoidable, and we find that more people choose to avoid it but not to the detriment of civic engagement. It is on future scholars to re-focus on the question whether we are now at the point where less news use indeed has the integrating function for society foreseen by Putnam – and whether this finding can be extended beyond a crisis situation like the one we studied. So far, we can conclude that less news consumption is not necessarily bad news for democracy.