More people turning away from news, report says
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj7799jv74vo
Posted by Alert-One-Two
More people turning away from news, report says
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj7799jv74vo
Posted by Alert-One-Two
41 Comments
Doesn’t surprise me at all.
The news lately has just been depressing in many ways. The constant use of clickbait and ragebait headlines and content to drive engagement is draining.
Problem is people then seem to rely more on social media for their news, ending up using what people are saying or snippets of out of context news shared online and not reading the full story.
Informed and well sourced news is dying. People would rather get there news from social media because it tells them what they want to hear to suit there agenda.
Doesn’t help that a lot of once reputable news sites and newspapers have basically just become clickbait.
“more people turning away from news, says news”
I know many people who have stopped following the news, my wife being one of them, because it’s all doom-for-clicks.
I remember a time before 24 hour rolling news, before then news agencies didn’t need to constantly try and find new stories to break and be the first to break them – it was a simpler time
I’m one of those people. Radio 4 addict since my early teens but threw out my last remaining radio last year (and never had a TV). Why? Because it’s boring and it’s not informative. Everything on the so-called news is about personalities. Every interview is about playing word-games, trying to trick people into saying something stupid. Worse still, a lot of important stuff goes unreported.
There are a few places that still do the real stuff. The financial news outlets are usually ok. Mainly I guess because you can’t sell fake news to people who need to know what’s going on in the world in order to make money.
If I want to know what’s going on in the UK, I go to NPR, Reuters, the WSJ or Bloomberg.
The war in the middle east exposed the mainstream media for the farce it is .
I don’t think I know anyone 20-40 that really watches it. Its more something our parents who are 50+ watch.
Watching the “news “then finding the truth causes cognitive dissonance people don’t like it. Headline inflation has fallen . But everything is still 25-50 % more than last year. Then you see rubbish about anti semitism it’s not just Jewish people who are Semitic when it’s really the Zionist ideology people are against .Then you have absolute liars Politicians spouting rubbish and hiding the truth . If you stop watching the News brainwashing services your depression will disappear without medication .
But how are you going to watch it if you’re not facing the telly?
I used to think “At least there’s The Guardian”, but over the last 5 years even they ramped up the culture wars bullshit and disinformation. They also bury stories where the country is doing sort of ok and gone all in on doom, albeit from the other side. And now that Labour is lined up for a landslide win, Owen Jones and his ilk have moved to ‘nope not good enough’, so I guess I can count on their doom clickbait continuing?
I’ll never read The Telegraph, The Sun, Daily Mail, and the rest, but I also don’t want The Guardian telling me the country is ending and I’m a piece of shit for being x, y & z. If I were upper middle class like many of their readers, maybe I could accept being called shit and feel smug in the self flaggelation of faux progressivism, but I’m not so I don’t have the mental fortitude for it. Life is already hard enough, so I guess I won’t read anything.
Ahhhh opinions and bias instead of actual reporting loses you viewers – who would have guessed!?
the constant apologising from BBC about their mistakes before fact checking the news source have endend my BBC news watching habbit. I dont want to keep telling people the news i saw on BBC just now is not even accurate.
Also too many news media channels reporting the exact same news only for income from advert revenue
Clickbait, ragebait, and agendas. It seems to be impossible to just get ‘the truth’. Sigh.
I think it was about 2002/3 when my eyes got opened with regards to the way media can influence public opinion and spin narratives. Back in the 1980s there had been a trial/conviction in my local area that had caused protests, and I remember those protests continuing at the University I went to.
I met some people who had given evidence at the trial, and chatted to them about their experiences – especially with regards to what I had remembered being printed in the newspapers, and the subsequent outcry.
…and learned that the local rags had spread bullshit, and refused to print interviews with many of those actually involved – because it didn’t fit the narrative they were trying to push.
I’ve been somewhat sceptical ever since.
When the news (from all sides) is only interested in pushing factional messages, and not interested in just stating the facts and letting people draw their own conclusions, this is not a surprise.
Possibly the worst thing that the Tories ever did was turning the BBC into a tory mouthpiece, rather than the respected, (mostly) independent, factual news source it used to be.
Social media actively hates on reliable sources of information.
If i make a pro bbc comment here the responses will be downvotes and replies saying “lol bbc reliable source roflmao?” Both right and left feel attacked by it, and consider it either right or left accordingly, and their echo chambers are to blame and making them worse.
This influences yet more people to start thinking this way over time. It’s starting to get reaĺly bad and out of control.
I think there is a real audience capture issue with news.
If you don’t care about news, which is most people, as the article says you’re going to find it boring, depressing, and probably quite polarizing. So you’re probably going to trend towards not watching it. So that’s like 80% of people out of the picture straight away.
However, if you do care about the news, and you’re even remotely aware of what a computer is, you’re going to collate your aggregate sources very carefully. And upon doing so, you’ll make some I think fairly universal discoveries.
1. Print media on the internet is hot garbage. Like, seriously bin juice tier stuff. All newspaper sites are awful for umpteen different reasons. So *that’s* out.
2. Larger news networks are mostly awful thinly veiled propaganda machines. This does capture more audience share, but you’re more often than not attracting the crazies, and uninformed. Which is ultimately damaging to a networks credibility, and railroads the network down an awkward path to pander to their audience and before you know it, the cart is before the horse. And while the people radicalized on this network get louder, I think it’s fair to say a fair few people have moments of self awareness enough to step away from the Fox News.
3. News aggregate websites. This is where some more sensible discourse goes on, it’s not perfect but it’s about as civilized as it can get without it descending into chaos de jure. But from a news as a business point of view, what’s the play there? Posts are posted by users, in real time, and expertise is crowd sourced. Sure it’s not always high quality stuff, but seemingly it’s no lower in terms of quality than journalists can come up with. This is where people get their news because news aggregates can exist *anywhere.* Most notably social media. I’d bet my bottom dollar most kids see news on TikTok.
The problem is, the content on these platforms are *so low brainrot quality,* and *so easy to manipulate*, that all it really does is kill the perceived value of news. Why even consume it if you literally know for a fact that 90% of the news you consume is just straight up lies or bait? What’s the point of even partaking when you have to have so much base knowledge and experience in news consumption to know when news is good and when its bad. There is no trust. It’s much easier to follow the discourse on somewhere like Reddit and from the sentiment of the back and forth’s get an idea of what *you* think about a given topic.
For me, the tipping point was during the early stages of covid, when the major news channels had a tally of covid deaths that would tick over with each ‘confirmed fatality’. It was so morbid, and made me realise how sensationalism overrides actual humanity in the race for views.
Good. It’s time for editors to reconsider going back to a true unbiased reporting while ditching the social media approaches to engage with the audiences
A tip I’ve learnt to stay aware of what’s going on, even if I don’t have the mental energy to read about whatever horrible stuff is happening: listen to a news podcast instead. There’s a few good ones out there – I really like Paper Cuts, which each weekday has a different panel look at all the day’s newspapers (so if you’re not keen on one guest/host, you can listen the next day and it’ll be someone else). They pick apart particular papers’ agendas and bs whilst still treating the serious bits with respect, but in a way you can listen to on your lunch break without it ruining your afternoon. Great stuff.
Being lied to on a daily basis can be tiresome, so yes, people will turn off.
>In the UK, interest in news has almost halved since 2015
Hmmm, what happened post-2015 and why would it make people want to stop watching the news? Trust in the UK media plummeted from the start of 2016 to the start of 2020 according to the Edelman trust barometer. UK media was ranked as the least trustworthy in the world according to their latest report. Their CEO said previously “It all started with Brexit”.
I believe I originated the term “activists disguised as journalists” to describe this post-Brexit phenomenon. The elites were the most anti-Brexit group according to Ashcroft polling. 52% of the country supported Brexit, but it seemed like at least 90% of celebrity TV presenters and media elites opposed it, and the voting public knew it. Many narcissistic elites in the media tried to subvert democracy because they thought their opinion was more important than the opinion of the majority.
In my early twenties, I was into Twitter and slowly became radicalised without really being aware of it so now I do not watch anything news related at all. It only raises my blood pressure and turns me into a little goblin.
Now I only use Reddit and occasionally sone YouTube.
I prefer knowing what’s going on in my local community through the free newspaper, community events and helping my neighbours.
Also I am trying to get an allotment going to grow veg for my neighbours to share. That is much healthier for my mind than reading about abject misery, war, poverty and other crap from the media.
I imagine it’s linked somewhat to voter apathy in that people see the state of the world and their own country and then proceed to check out of politics and focus only on their own day to day. I’ve had many times where I’ve felt like I want to go down that road but it’s too hard for me to not give at least somewhat of a monkeys
I follow the news but I no longer look at BBC news. It seems so incredibly biased and I hate how it claims to be impartial.
Given bbc doing stuff like this
https://thecritic.co.uk/newsnight-and-the-rapist/
Yes we are turning away from them
Because it just parrots PR speak and doesn’t actually challenge any bullshit that politicians now know they can get away with.
Anyone wanting to challenge the current system gets silenced by not getting jobs within media.
If they are talking about the 24 hour, rolling, news channels then yes. Every channel running the 6 same stories, with a slightly different spin, on a 15 minute repeat.
Because it’s terribly depressing. I deleted the sky news app a while ago and not looked back. I’m depressed enough as it is, and by not reading it I have got a little bit happier. I know what’s happening in the world, I don’t need death and destruction shoved down my throat day in day out.
But BBC Verify said more people are watching the news, in particular BBC News. 😉
I stopped watching news 5 years ago. It’s all doom and gloom ” our top stories” exactly they feel like stories not news. We only hear what the editors/owners want put out it always feels like there’s some agenda behind it now.
I get my news from this sub now, I cant stand the BBC website and the way it writes in a deliberately confusing way. The other sites are too biased or unreadable.
Two of the worst things about the creation of news in social media was that.
1. Now any media outlet can pump out their agenda to people on a daily and almost unavoidable basis. The news cycle is amplified.
2. Comment sections now mean that the local curtain twitching uneducated weirdo has equal space on a subject than someone who is qualified to talk about it. – I know nothing about astrophysics but now I could write any old BS about it online and get as many ‘likes’ as someone who has studied it at PHD level.
As for conventional news, the BBC has had too much government interference ‘report how we like it or we will take away the licence fee’, Channel 4 almost got privatised and many thought it was because of their news coverage. All the newspapers are mouthpieces for their right wing editors. I’m not surprised people are turning away from all of it, look at the people who absorb everything the media says or read online, they are far from happy people.
Media can only blame themselves for it, its always some depressing news whenever I check out whats happening right now, so why even bother
I stopped paying much attention to the news after a couple of really misleading stories which made me realise I just don’t trust anything they say any more.
Is anyone surprised when it consists of:
No, that isn’t happening.
Ok, that thing is happening but it’s a very small issue.
Ok, that thing you said is happening is happening on the scale you said, but here’s why that’s actually a good thing.
If you keep saying that thing is a problem, you’re the problem.
Doesn’t surprise me. Most news channels are shit and that’s ignoring any bias found in them. Give me the short version and fuck off.
It’s almost as if listening to/reading a source of constantly depressing, doom-saying information with oftentimes clickbait headlines, as well as low-quality filler content when not much is going on (look at how long they dragged out the Ever Given situation when nothing but Covid was happening), reduces your credibility and puts people off…
Haven’t bothered with the news for years honestly, it’s nothing but brain-rotting, doom-and-gloom rubbish most of the time.
The way I see it, anything genuinely interesting/I need to know will make its way into my Reddit feed, or another social media feed, or people will actually be talking about it irl.
“WARNING: ECOLI FOUND IN TAP WATER, DO NOT DRINK!”
Man this news is so depressing, always being so dramatic; think i’ll have a drink of water now they mentioned it…”
I made a conscious decision about 4 years ago to stop watching the BBC, Sky, ITV news etc – and instead follow news via Podcasts and Independent journalists. I follow both left and right coverage.
For two reasons:
– Continual 24/7 doom and fear mongering. It’s exhausting.
– The mainstream media news has a really “gotcha” approach to journalism that’s annoying, painful, expected and boring. Look at how Cathy Newman (Channel 4) treated Jordan Peterson. Or how James Clayton (BBC) recently treated Elon Musk. You have one of the worlds most interesting businessmen putting guys into space and you grill him on identity and gender politics?! Lame. I’m not massive fan of either Musk or Peterson by why are you not talking about their profression but instead going for some weird “gotcha” soundbite. This happens all the time.
I feel better for turning it off. My family never watches it, it’s banned in the house.