Between Media Voluntarism and the Order of the Media Landscape : Avoiding Media Types in a High-choice Media Environment
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the current high-choice media environments, the issue of news avoidance is increasingly being discussed. Due to the assumption that well-informed citizens constitute a critical condition for the health of democratic societies (Skovsgaard & Andersen, 2020), most attention aims at the people who avoid the news at all. Thus, common causes of general news avoidance are known, such as low trust in the media (Wagner & Boczkowski, 2019), alienation from politics (Skovsgaard & Andersen, 2020), or a feeling of information overload (Song et al., 2017). However, most audience members selectively avoid only some media (Newman et al., 2022), and since the perspective that respects this fact is slowly becoming established (Aharoni et al., 2021), we still lack a more nuanced understanding of why some people avoid some distinct types of media and do not avoid some other (Lindell & Mikkelsen Bage, 2022). Therefore, our study fills this gap and focuses on differences in predictors of avoiding selected distinct types of news media that differ in their editorial practices and audience construction: public service broadcasters, commercial broadcasters, mainstream print and online news, tabloid media, and alternative media. We consider the selective news avoidance as one of the results of audiences’ need to cope with the multiplicity of news sources by building their media repertoires (Tóth et al., 2022) where this selective active news avoidance of particular news media types may refer to audience members’ differences in attitudes to news media and in media trust, in media literacy and reflexivity and media expectations as well as in political attitudes and interest in politics. To grasp these differences, we calculate logistic regression models to compare predictors of avoidance of each selected news media type. The study employs data from the 2022 representative survey of Czech adult population (N = 2340). |
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