What is news avoidance, and why are 42% of people quitting the news?

Summary: News avoidance is choosing to skip the news, sometimes or often, on purpose. 42% of people in nearly 50 countries now do it, citing mood, volume, war coverage, and powerlessness. Many are selective avoiders who struggle with overload and cut back on certain topics or at certain times. Quitting badly designed news consumption can leave you better informed.

42% of people across nearly 50 countries now say they sometimes or often avoid the news, per the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026. The United States sits at 45%, the United Kingdom at 50%, and Croatia leads at 63%. A 2025 University of Canberra report found over 70% of Australians under 35 steer clear of current affairs.

How many people are quitting the news?

In 2017, 29% told the Reuters Digital News Report they sometimes or often avoided the news. By 2026 it was 42%, a 45% relative increase in nine years, and the curve hasn't come back down.

An August 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that only 36% of US adults follow the news all or most of the time. The American Press Institute's 2026 Media Insight Project study reports that roughly one in three Americans feel overwhelmed by the news or find it too stressful, seven in 10 actively try to avoid celebrity news, and three in five avoid political news, including news about the sitting president.

Avoiders skew younger: people under 35 in the countries the Reuters Institute tracks are more likely to disengage, and women are more likely than men to report feeling worn out by news volume.

Why are people quitting the news?

The reasons are mostly consistent across countries, per the Reuters Institute's 2025 report. Four of the most common, in order:

• Negative mood impact. The top reason overall. The news leaves people feeling worse.

• Volume overload. Even readers who care deeply describe being worn out by sheer quantity. The 24-hour news cycle plus social media adds up to more than anyone is built to take in.

• Coverage of war and conflict. Ukraine, the Middle East, and an unstable global political environment have produced years of relentless conflict coverage, and many readers avoid the news to step away from war footage.

• Powerlessness. A common refrain: "I can't do anything about this." Readers who feel no agency over events disengage from the reporting.

A fifth driver, from the Reuters Institute's 2022 report, is distrust: readers who suspect they're being manipulated, fed partisan framing, or overserved by outrage-optimized algorithms stop engaging with the source rather than the content.

Is quitting the news a rational choice?

Yes, for many people.

A 2014 PNAS study linked six or more hours a day of coverage in the week after the Boston Marathon bombings to higher acute stress than direct exposure to the attack. Doomscrolling, cycling through bad-news content for hours without an off-ramp, is associated with worse sleep.

There's also a structural argument: most news, on most days, contains almost no information the average person can act on, like a political fight that resolves in months or years.

Rational doesn't mean everyone should quit. Voting, local engagement, and personal safety decisions all benefit from current information. But endless consumption doesn't make you informed, and quitting a badly designed habit can leave you better informed.

Consistent avoiders vs selective avoiders

The Reuters Institute splits news avoiders into two groups.

Consistent avoiders have low overall interest in news and skew toward less formal education. The democratic concern applies most strongly here.

Selective avoiders struggle with overload and have deliberately limited their intake, avoiding specific topics (politics, war, celebrity coverage) or habits (push alerts, late-night checking) rather than news in general. They still care, and they're the readers we write for.

What does smart quitting look like?

Five practices separate productive news avoidance from total disengagement.

1. Choose one or two trusted sources and ignore the rest. Algorithm-driven feeds optimize for engagement over information. One or two vetted outlets beat a hundred news-shaped notifications.

2. Read on a schedule instead of on impulse. Once a day or once a week beats a hundred checks, and nothing you'd have caught at 11 PM will have gone anywhere by morning.

3. Pick a format with a defined endpoint. A daily briefing ends and a timeline doesn't, and that endpoint is most of the difference between informed and hooked.

4. Disable push notifications. Almost none are urgent enough to justify the interruption.

5. Read for signal rather than emotion. If a story doesn't change your decisions or your understanding of something specific, it doesn't earn its keep.

The news industry's incentives run the other way: publishing less and notifying less means fewer clicks, so the discipline is yours to choose. Fix your news diet turns these rules into a seven-day plan, and The case for reading less news argues why less works.

How to stay informed without doomscrolling

What works for selective avoiders, in our experience, is one defined input per day, from a trusted source, in a format with a clear end: a print newspaper, a weekly magazine, a daily email newsletter, or a once-a-day briefing on a channel you chose. Infinite feeds, algorithmic timelines, and notification streams don't qualify. Print, SMS, email, and audio all work as long as the format has a defined boundary.

If you've been thinking about quitting

You aren't alone, and we think it's a defensible response. The question worth spending time on is what replaces the habit, because a selective avoider reading one trusted brief a day ends up more informed than the doomscroller checking all day.

How informed.now thinks about quitting the news

Most outlets have answered the numbers above by publishing more. informed.now started from the opposite premise: one short briefing each weekday, sent by text, for someone who wants to be informed without being overwhelmed.

SMS news has existed for years. What's new is framing it as an answer to the avoidance trend rather than another competitor in the firehose. A morning brief by text, then done for the day, quits only the version of news consumption that drove people away.

A few weeks of it will tell you more than we can: one defined input each weekday, written for adults and delivered without an algorithm, solves more of the avoidance problem than the next feed does.