By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson
Yesterday morning National Public Radio’s “On Point” program interviewed Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University about “news avoidance.” All over the world people are getting sick of watching, listening and reading the news, and they are simply turning it off. In the United States, 41% of the population are news avoiders. In countries with even more fraught political situations than our own, like Greece and Turkey, news avoiders are 57% of the population. At the other end of the spectrum, where the national politics are reasonable, in the Nordic countries news avoidance ranges from 21% in Sweden to 14% in Denmark.
Why do people avoid the news? According to the research by the Nieman Lab, because people don’t trust the news media and because they don’t think that the time they spend taking in the news adds anything to their lives. Why don’t people trust the news? “On Point” played recordings from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News that were ostensibly news anchors delivering the news, but the partisan slants were obvious and the tone was aggressive and derisive. As someone who does not listen to any of these networks, I found the few seconds of exposure to them to be an aggravation of the senses. “If this is news,” I thought, “I’d avoid it too.”
Benton, who used to work for CNN before he went to the Nieman Lab, said that it is the media’s focus on conflict that wears out people. This attitude exists from global networks right down to small town media. When I worked for a weekly newspaper in a central New York village I always knew that something bad was going to happen when I walked into the trustees’ meeting and the daily newspaper’s reporter was there. When the local television news was there, I knew something even worse was going to happen. In one case there was a lot of yelling and threatening from an audience member at one meeting, and so at the next one there was a village police officer in the room and the rest of the media, waiting for the blood to spill. When nothing really happened, they ginned it up anyway and rehashed the hearsay about the incident at the previous meeting. Then they disappeared.
When actual conflict exists, it needs to be reported. But when one person is ticked off at a board because he wants his own way (the law be damned) and he isn’t getting it, that isn’t really news. That is someone being annoying and no one really gains anything from extensive, adjective-laden coverage of a temper tantrum. However, responsible news organizations don’t ignore events like this altogether, because in these situations, it is the media’s job to counter the rumor mill and, in the present era, the gossip cavalcade that is social media.
The Reuters Institute questioned people as to why they avoided the news. The top three responses: 48% said they did so because the news had a negative effect on their mood, 37% said they could not rely on the news to be true, and 28% said they felt like they couldn’t do anything about the events they heard about. All of the responses fell into two categories: one had to do with the depressing nature of news and the other with disapproving of the news media generally. In the U.S. people who identify as left tend to avoid news because of its effect on their mood, while people who lean right more often find it to be unreliable.
The latter jibes with the feedback that I get here at the Eagle Times. We publish opinion pieces on the opinion page from across the political spectrum. Many people regard these as news reporting, apparently because the networks no longer discriminate clearly between news and opinion. We publish opinions that do not correspond with the political persuasions of anyone in the newsroom. They appear because we believe that multiple points of view should be heard. However, some points of view are simply not supported by facts.
A recent rejected essay argued that the liberals of Brattleboro who allowed climate-change activists to disrupt The Strolling of the Heifers would not have been as tolerant of conservative activists demonstrating in support of veterans. Given that conservative activists have been allowed, for example, to demonstrate outside women’s health clinics for many years in many jurisdictions with liberal governments and populations, I’d say this is a statement unsupported by the facts. So, not only is an essay like this not news, it isn’t even a sound opinion supported by logic or evidence. People are getting very, very tired of having to listen to or read the equivalent of one guy ranting at them.
The local news in the Eagle Times is found on pages A1 through A4. We don’t report on crime very extensively because a lot of it does not rise to the standard of being news. The lion’s share of crime in the I-91 corridor is property crime, much of it committed by drug addicts looking for something to sell or settling scores. The grand jury report, which we edit into readable form and publish, is a litany of bad decisions, very often related to the need to procure more drugs or receive payment for them. The behaviors described don’t have much to do with the normal workings of a community. We focus our reporting on the vast majority of people who are engaged in constructive projects to better the community, not on the small minority who are dominated by their addictions and other demons. When the media gives inordinate attention to a small dysfunctional segment of the community, it makes people think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It isn’t.
Writing all this in a news editorial is very much preaching to the choir. You aren’t avoiding news; you subscribe to the Eagle Times or have picked up a copy somewhere. I suppose I am hoping you, the reader, will mention to someone else that if they are avoiding the news for the reasons stated above, they could do worse than turn to the Eagle Times as a safe haven, a place where we try to broaden your understanding of the world, not just confirm your prejudices.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
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