Reuters Global Survey on Why People Avoid The News

Survey of 68,542 people in 47 countries conducted between January 2025 and February 2025. The answers and the reasons are revealing.

Credit: Reuters Institute

Question: why do you find yourself actively trying to avoid the news? Respondents were asked to select all answers that apply. From this, researchers compiled the headline data below from everyone that often, sometimes, or occasionally avoids news across all markets.

39% say they avoid the news because it has a negative effect on their mood; 31% are worn out by the amount of news; 30% say that there is too much coverage of war / conflict; 29% say there's too much politics; 20% say there's nothing that they can do with the information; 18% say it leads to arguments that they would rather avoid and the same percentage say they avoid the news because it doesn't feel relevant to their life; whilst 9% say that the news is too hard to understand (rising to 14% amongst under 35s)

No wonder that this latest Reuters Institute report 'overview' states: "This year’s report comes at a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, not to mention climate breakdown and continuing destructive conflicts around the world. Against that background, evidence-based and analytical journalism should be thriving, with newspapers flying off shelves, broadcast media and web traffic booming. But we find traditional news media struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions."

So, why is this?

Whilst you may be getting your news from good, reliable sources (in addition, of course, to OGN Daily), the sad fact - according to the Reuters Institute survey - is that American social media platforms have become the primary news source for just over half of people worldwide. No wonder so many people are anxious about the news and that nearly 4 in 10 people around the globe actively avoid it.

This is compounded by the fact that seven of the top 10 English-language news websites are U.S-based, and American news therefore makes up more than 25 percent of all the world’s news. The result? An American echo chamber that dramatically distorts our understanding of the world, and where the latest outrage from the Trump administration generates a hundred op-eds, while vast new protected areas in the Amazon or the elimination of another tropical disease in Africa never register.

This paucity of uplifting news and the unfortunate focus on negativity is further supported by an interesting recent analysis that clearly, and alarmingly, demonstrated that the World's Top Ten News Websites Are Doom Machines.

It seems, therefore, that the real problem is that journalism has become a machine for manufacturing despair, accelerated and promulgated by social media. What started as a way to inform us has evolved into a system designed to agitate us. It’s not because journalists are necessarily malicious, but because that's what today's attention economy rewards.