Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media I'm Brooke Gladstone. Interpreting polls is tough even for the most media literate. There can be contradictory and wrong. Their ubiquity may be one of the reasons so many of us when faced with the news choose to turn away but certainly not the only reason and certainly not these days.

Benjamin Toff is an assistant professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the book, Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. Welcome to the show, Benjamin.

Benjamin Toff: Thank you so much, great to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: You and your co-authors interviewed about 100 people across three countries, and then supplemented those interviews with surveys. There are people who consume news less than once a month, right?

Benjamin Toff: Right. In some countries, it's a relatively small group like 1% or 2% in, say, Denmark or Finland but in the United States and the UK it was more like 7% or 8% which is millions of people. The project began with wanting to understand, who are these people? What are their lives like? What do they think about news and journalism they're encountering? There's a mix of people who are in this category and some were very well educated, very politically engaged to some degree, they had made a very deliberate choice.

For example, there's an engineer I spoke with in Iowa who had done a cost-benefit analysis of his own time and felt like paying attention to news just wasn't worth the time investment that he was putting into it. For many others, the pattern is pretty consistent that the people who are most likely in this category who are paying little to no attention to news tend to be among the most marginalized people in the society. They tend to be less educated, to lower socioeconomic status, they tend to be already on the margins of society when it comes to engaging, participating in political life.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean principally voting?

Benjamin Toff: Principally voting, but not always politically, and a lot of these one-on-one conversations, people would talk about how they found it just so hard to make sense of important political issues going on in their own communities because they felt so disconnected.

Brooke Gladstone: For these people who feel disconnected from the news, you found that that behavior was bound up in other forms of disengagement.

Benjamin Toff: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: A lot of these people, for instance, just don't have the time, they may be working two jobs and taking care of family members. They you found, may regard news as an irrelevant luxury.

Benjamin Toff: Right. Part of it was about existing store of knowledge to make sense of the information that they were encountering, people feel they have to look up the details of what terms mean.

Brooke Gladstone: You referred to a kind of arcane news language where you had to come to a story with some prior knowledge of it.

Benjamin Toff: Exactly. A lot of the people who were paying so little attention to news, they didn't know how to place themselves politically on the left to right, they often didn't really identify with any political party, and so, the stakes of a lot of political stories just didn't really register for them. It was also about being invested in stories about politics, which for many people, that's what they equated news with.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you have any guesses why younger people of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to avoid the news than older people?

Benjamin Toff: One piece of it is, people will say, it's not that they don't see any potential value in news, some will say, I expect when I get older, maybe when I have a mortgage, maybe when I have these other commitments or more rooted in the community, maybe then I'll pay more attention to it. I think that for this population in general, there was a common frustration of like, "Well, what difference does it make ultimately? If I know more about what's happening, what can I actually do about anything?" If you don't feel there's much you can actually do to solve the myriad problems that the news is presenting, it doesn't feel it's a good investment of your time.

Brooke Gladstone: I think a lot of us think of it as a solo activity. Maybe you read the paper, you do that by yourself, or you're listening to the radio, but you drew a very clear conclusion that news consumption is principally social.

Benjamin Toff: People who really enjoy news who are immersed in these news communities, it's a very social activity. It's a point of connection between people. We talked about how to make sense of what you're hearing and to process the information. I think it's a really important piece of how we don't allow it to just make us feel as depressed as it might because we rely on each other to help us feel either maybe something we can do about what we're hearing, but also a source of strength from those around us as they're having a similar experience.

Brooke Gladstone: Some people told you that they never developed a routine of consuming news, and they didn't know people who did.

Benjamin Toff: For myself and I think for my co-authors as well, I think it made us that much more aware of, if we're really honest with ourselves, why do we consume the amount of news that we do? We'd like to tell ourselves this because we feel more empowered as citizens. It's not that that stuff isn't true, it's just that, there's a bigger part of the explanation here that I think does trace back to the communities we're a part of, the social expectations around consuming news, and the benefits we derive from talking about news with the people in our lives.

For people who generally are not paying attention to news, they often don't have that in their lives. It not only makes it harder to feel there's much enjoyable part of the experience of paying attention to news but also reinforcing the notion that it's a useful habit to develop.

Brooke Gladstone: Folk theories are a way that people weave together a notion of how the world works, and there are folk theories about media and media platforms that you encountered. One of them was the idea that the news will find me.

Benjamin Toff: Yes, people have the sense that when they go online, they don't have to seek out the news on their own or even develop their own habits on following news that it'll just find you all by itself. To some degree, I think those of us who are immersed in very strong communities of other news consumers, we do see a lot of posts by other people we know, other journalists we know, but the algorithms themselves, the platforms themselves, not everybody's experience is going to be the same. There's a belief that this is the case that may not be necessarily matched with the reality of one's experience when they do go on these platforms.

One of the other folk theories that we heard in the course of these interviews was what we call "the information is out there folk theory," which is the sense that if you wanted to know what was going on, you would just go out and Google it and then you'd find it all, but actually, that information only exists because there's a journalist who spent time and resources, gathering that news, and that piece of the puzzle is often gone unstated or unacknowledged among a lot of the news avoiders.

Brooke Gladstone: Those are two of the folk theories, the news will find me or I can easily find the news because of the technology, but there's a third theory that seems to belie the other two, which is even if I encounter news, I won't know how to make sense of it.

Benjamin Toff: Yes, we call that the "I don't know what to believe folk theory." Not all news avoiders felt it, there were some who felt fairly confident in their own ability to make sense of what information they might encounter. Part of it was because they also didn't feel like most news was all that relevant to them, so they didn't have a whole lot of desire to make sense of a lot of that information that was out there. There were others who were pretty frustrated and felt like they just didn't have the tools at their disposal to make sense of the differences between different news organizations, or why they should trust one versus the other. This very strong protective sense of like they needed to be distrusting of everything that was out there because they didn't want to be manipulated.

Brooke Gladstone: The safest course of action wasn't to trust anything that you saw, and just avoid it all.

Benjamin Toff: Exactly. There is definitely a strong correlation between trust and the likelihood that somebody was avoiding the news. On the other hand, it's not purely about distrust, there's a fair amount of people who would say, "It's not news, it's me." They would talk about being very anxious people or would feel like, "Oh, maybe there's useful information out there, but it's just too difficult to figure out which of those sources is reliable." They would take the position that is easier or smarter to just be distrusting everything.

Brooke Gladstone: A few years back, I spoke with Eitan Hersh, the author of Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. He took a survey of about 1,000 people, and he found that of the people who say they spend two or more hours each day on politics and civic engagement, the vast majority of them are just reading the news and talking about politics.

Benjamin Toff: They read the newspaper, they listen to NPR, and then they could listen to a bunch of podcasts or watch MSNBC or Fox News for hours. Even if the stuff they're learning about is gossip and minutiae, they'll say, "Oh, it's my civic duty to be informed," but if you ask them, "Okay, well, who should I vote for in a local election?" They would say, "I have no idea. I don't know anything about the local elections. I don't know anything about the state. I really could just tell you a lot about Sharpiegate, the Mueller investigation, but I can't tell you a thing that would actually inform your vote.

Brooke Gladstone: All this news consumption didn't translate into actual political work, or going out and helping people in the community, or giving money to charity. Maybe the news avoiders have a point.

Benjamin Toff: I do think they have a point. I do think that there are levels of news consumption that I think can border on spectatorship, particularly around politics where part of the interest in it is people are really invested in their side winning. There's a segment of news avoiders in the United States that was unique around people who are expressing discontent about mainstream media and see it as liberal bias as the reason why they're avoiding the news.

Brooke Gladstone: When you ask news avoiders, is it a civic duty to consume the news? You said there was some ambivalence, some of them though, felt strongly that it doesn't make a better citizen to hear and parrot sound bites.

Benjamin Toff: Yes, one of the other news avoiders, we did a follow-up interview with in the intervening months in between, he changed his habits, and he started to subscribe to satellite radio in his car, he spent a lot of his workday driving around the state. one of the things he noticed right away was, he thought that one of his colleagues who talked about news a lot and he found a source of annoyance, the degree to which he talks about the news. What he said was he felt he was not actually as smart as he seemed, he was just repeating things he had heard on CNN. Those of us who pay a lot of attention to news, it does give us ways of making sense of the world around us that I think can be a value but also can be a crutch, especially when it comes to politics.

Brooke Gladstone: The news environment we're currently swimming in is especially heavy and difficult, and there's two major wars dominating the headlines. Sometimes I don't think it's helpful to be always embroiled in the suffering of others. I think it can be paralyzing. I guess the question is, how do you know when the amount you're consuming is not healthy?

Benjamin Toff: I think it's partly about giving yourself permission that it's perfectly natural to feel that way and it can be healthier to cut back and to find strategies that are more about ensuring that the time and attention you're spending with news are valuable and be more about the quality of that experience rather than it being about the quantity. I think that there are really important functions that news plays in a way that few other institutions in society can substitute for.

I'm thinking of one of the news lovers that I interviewed who, he had a pretty challenging life. He was a recovering alcoholic who was unemployed. He was homebound because his driver's license had been revoked. For him, news was rather than this horribly depressing thing that I think many of us feel like it often is, he recognized that, but for him, he said it was a window into the outside world and he so appreciated having access to all these things happening elsewhere in a way that he really drew strength from. I think some people have that reaction. I think that's a very positive thing. I think news isn't always just a negative experience. If it was, no one would be paying attention to it.

Brooke Gladstone: Benjamin Toff is the co-author of the new book, Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. Thanks.

Benjamin Toff: You're welcome.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, when a comic stretches an autobiographical truth to make a bad thing seem worse, is that still comedy? This is On The Media.