More and more Americans are tuning out the news — here's why

02 September

After the United States' 2024 presidential election, MSNBC suffered a drop in viewership. One explanation is that MSNBC's viewers were so repulsed by the election's outcome and Donald Trump's narrow victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris that they were making a point of avoiding the news.

Almost ten months have passed since that election, but the phenomenon of news avoidance hasn't gone away.

In an article published by The Guardian on Labor Day 2025, reporter Josie Harvey emphasizes that some people who practice "news avoidance" see it as a way to protect their "mental health."

"News has never been more accessible," Harvey explains. "But for some, that's exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out. The reasons vary: for some, it's the sheer volume of news — for others, the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself."

Harvey adds, "In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely."

One person who is practicing news avoidance is Mardette Burr, an Arizona-based retiree.

Burr told The Guardian, "Now that I don't watch the news, I just don't have that anxiety. I don't have dread. There were times that I’d be up at two or three o'clock in the morning upset about something that was going on in the world that I just didn't have a lot of control over."

Citing research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published on June 17, Harvey notes that "globally, news avoidance is at a record high."

Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, believes that too much news consumption can be bad for one's mental wellbeing.

Silver told The Guardian, "With greater exposure, we see greater distress in people's reports of their mental health. Greater anxiety, greater depression, greater post- traumatic stress symptoms, acute stress symptoms…. There's just ample opportunity to be exposed to news all the time, through either push notifications on people's phones, or people can be consuming news across many different modes simultaneously."

Similarly, Benjamin Toff, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the 2023 book, "Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism," told The Guardian, "We live in a world in which you can access news 24/7 and be inundated with information at all times. But that doesn’t mean you should."

Read Josie Harvey's full article for The Guardian at this link.

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