Perceiving News as Peripheral and Populist Predispositions Among News Avoiders

• In Event: Choosing Your News

Abstract

This paper examines links between populist movements and a rejection of conventional news media by people on the periphery of emergent populist movements across three unique political information environments: the UK, Spain, and the US. We draw on in-depth interviews with more than 100 individuals who say they rarely-to-never access conventional news media. In the UK and Spain, these interviews were conducted during periods in which movements that relied heavily on populist appeals gained significant traction: in the first case in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, and in the second case the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. These interviews are compared to an additional round of US interviews with news avoiders in Iowa in 2019 including a contrasting group of news enthusiasts.

Using a comparative qualitative approach to audience research, we show considerable uniformity across country contexts in news avoiders’ attitudes and habits regarding politics and news, despite major differences in countries’ media and political information environments. We find that news avoiders, not generally active embracers of populist movements themselves, nonetheless often demonstrate attitudes toward news and politics that make them predisposed to be receptive to populist appeals. Specifically, study participants showed a strong disaffection from political and civic affairs—a feeling that politics was too focused on distant matters and not connected to daily life—and crucially, did not view conventional sources of news as distinct from, or in opposition to, powerful elites in government. Rather, news was often viewed as a distraction from the real matters that concerned people in their daily lives, such as unemployment, or crime, or family leave. We argue that this pervasive sense of alienation from not only establishment politics but also mainstream media may serve as building blocks for a populist worldview.

Since many news avoiders asserted that the most significant problems in their lives were left unaddressed by both the political and media establishment, they often turned to non-traditional news sources—which generally do not perform the critical watchdog role usually attributed to the mainstream media—and felt those nontraditional sources met their needs better. We conclude that populist leaders who claim to address news avoiders’ real problems using nontraditional news channels are likely to find them a sympathetic audience. While news avoiders occupy an extreme end of the news consumption spectrum, we argue that their attitudes merit close attention in an environment of increasing media choice. If more people opt out of conventional news, the population with these populist predispositions is likely to grow.

Authors

• Benjamin Toff, University of Minnesota

• Ruth Palmer, IE University