News Avoidance
Why people are quitting the news in 2026
Forty percent of people now avoid the news sometimes or often. The reasons are documented, the demographic is broad, and the response is not denial. It is a rational reaction to a broken information environment. Here is what the research says, who is quitting, and what to do instead.
Kira Shishkin
Forty percent of people across nearly 50 countries now say they sometimes or often avoid the news. That number comes from the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025, and it is the joint highest figure ever recorded. The United States sits at 42 percent. The United Kingdom at 46 percent. Bulgaria leads at 63 percent. In Australia, over 70 percent of people under 35 steer clear of current affairs. Quitting the news is no longer a fringe behavior or a sign of disengagement. It is a global pattern, and the reasons are well-documented.
How many people are actually quitting the news?
The trend is not subtle. The Reuters Digital News Report tracks news avoidance across nearly 50 countries every year. In 2017, 29 percent of people said they sometimes or often avoided the news. By 2025, the figure had climbed to 40 percent. That is a 38 percent relative increase in eight years, and the curve is not flattening.
An August 2025 survey found that only 36 percent of US adults follow the news all or most of the time. The American Press Institute's Media Insight Project reports that roughly one in three Americans says the news makes them feel overwhelmed or too stressful to engage with. Seven in 10 actively try to avoid celebrity news. Three in five avoid political news, including news about the sitting president.
The avoiders skew younger. Across countries tracked by Reuters, people under 35 are consistently more likely to disengage, with the trend strongest in markets where social media is the dominant news entry point. Women are also more likely than men to report feeling worn out by news volume.
These are not fringe numbers. The center of the distribution has moved.
Why are people quitting the news?
The reasons are consistent across countries and demographics. The Reuters Institute identifies four primary drivers, ranked by how often respondents cite them:
Negative mood impact. The top reason in nearly every country surveyed. The news leaves people feeling worse. Heavy news consumption correlates with elevated anxiety, disrupted sleep, and reduced sense of agency.
Volume overload. Even readers who care deeply about current events describe being worn out by sheer quantity. The 24-hour news cycle plus social media has produced a firehose nobody is built to drink from.
Coverage of war and conflict. The combination of Ukraine, the Middle East, and an unstable global political environment has produced years of relentless conflict coverage. Many readers report avoiding the news specifically to step away from war footage.
Powerlessness. A common refrain: "I cannot do anything about this." Readers who feel they have no agency over the events being reported tend to disengage from the reporting itself.
A fifth driver shows up in the academic literature: distrust. Readers who suspect they are being manipulated, fed partisan framing, or overserved by outrage-optimized algorithms eventually stop engaging with the source rather than the content.
Is quitting the news a rational choice?
The honest answer is yes, for many people, in many situations.
The case against constant news consumption is not soft. Studies link sustained exposure to negative news with measurable increases in anxiety, depressive symptoms, and stress hormones. The phenomenon known as doomscrolling, where readers cycle through bad-news content for hours without an off-ramp, is associated with worse sleep and worse mood the following day. There is a clinical literature on this now, not journalism about it.
There is also a structural argument. Most news, on most days, contains almost no information the average person can act on. Breaking news from a distant capital, a markets update, a celebrity scandal, a political fight that will resolve in months or years. The actionability of this content for an individual reader is close to zero.
Saying quitting is rational is not the same as saying everyone should quit. Civic participation depends on an informed public. Voting, local engagement, and personal safety decisions all benefit from current information. The honest framing is that consuming endless news is not the same as being informed, and quitting badly-designed news consumption can be a step toward being better informed, not worse.
Consistent avoiders vs selective avoiders
The Reuters Institute distinguishes between two groups of news avoiders, and the distinction matters.
Consistent avoiders have low overall interest in news and skew toward less formal education and weaker civic engagement. For this group, news avoidance is part of a broader disengagement from public life. The democratic concern about news avoidance applies most strongly here.
Selective avoiders are different. They are often well-educated, civically engaged, and capable readers who have made a deliberate decision to limit their news intake. They avoid specific topics (politics, war, celebrity coverage) or specific formats (social-media feeds, push alerts, cable news), not news in general. Many subscribe to one or two trusted sources, read once a day or once a week, and then close the tab.
The selective avoider is the fastest-growing segment. They are not quitting because they do not care. They are quitting the way they used to consume news, while looking for a healthier replacement.
This is the audience to take seriously.
What does smart quitting look like?
The research surfaces a small set of practices that distinguish productive news avoidance from total disengagement. Five rules, drawn from the work of media literacy researchers and the recommendations of practicing journalists:
Choose one or two trusted sources and ignore the rest. Algorithm-driven feeds optimize for engagement, not information. A handful of editorial outlets you have vetted will inform you better than a hundred news-shaped notifications.
Read on a schedule, not on impulse. Once a day or once a week beats a hundred checks a day. The world will still be there at 8 AM.
Pick a format with a defined endpoint. A daily briefing ends. A timeline does not. The endpoint matters: it is the difference between informed and addicted.
Disable push notifications. Push alerts pull you out of whatever you were doing on someone else's schedule. Almost none of them are urgent enough to justify the interruption.
Read for signal, not for emotion. If a story does not change your decisions, your worldview, or your understanding of something specific, it is not paying its keep on your attention.
These rules sound simple. The reason they are not widely practiced is that the news industry's incentives run in the opposite direction. Outlets that publish less and notify less generate fewer clicks. The reader has to choose the discipline. The platform will not.
How to stay informed without doomscrolling
The pattern that works for most selective avoiders looks the same across surveys and interviews: one defined input per day, from a source they trust, in a format with a clear end. That input could be a print newspaper, a weekly long-form magazine, a daily email newsletter, or a once-a-day briefing delivered to a channel they actively chose.
What it is not: an infinite feed, an algorithmic timeline, or a notification stream.
The mechanic matters more than the medium. Print works for the people for whom print works. SMS, email, and audio all work for others. The question is whether the format has a defined boundary or not.
How informed.now thinks about quitting the news
informed.now exists in part because the data above is real and the response from most outlets has been to publish more, not less. The product is built around a different premise: one short news briefing per day, sent by text, written for someone who has chosen this format because they want to be informed without being overwhelmed.
The category is not new. SMS news has existed for a decade in different forms. What is new is the explicit framing as an answer to the avoidance trend rather than a competitor in the firehose. Reading a daily brief by text and being done with the news for the day is not quitting the news. It is quitting the version of news consumption that drove people to quit in the first place.
This is hedged on purpose. The proof is in trying it for a few weeks. The argument is that a defined daily input, written for adults, delivered to a channel without an algorithm, solves more of the avoidance problem than the next algorithmic feed.
The bigger pattern
If you have been thinking about quitting the news, the data says you are not alone, and the research says it is a defensible response. The better question is what you replace your current habit with. The selective avoider who reads one trusted brief a day is more informed than the doomscroller checking 40 times. The first is design. The second is exhaustion. Pick the design.