Why People Choose To Avoid The News English Practice Ep 805
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Hi there and welcome to this Adept English podcast. How often do you watch the news? Do you find yourself avoiding the news because it's too upsetting, too annoying or too depressing or it causes other strong feelings? Let's talk today about something very current, something which affects many of us and which has a new name in English –

which I only learned last week. We're always coming up with new words and phrases and terms for things in English, and I'm sure it's the same in your language too. But it wasn't until just recently that I heard the phrase news avoidance. The verb to avoid, A-V-O-I-D, means to stay away from something or to not allow yourself to do something. And I noticed this trend, this thing happening.

so-called news avoidance. Hello, I'm Hilary and you're listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So, start listening now and find out how it works.

The number of people watching the TV news is falling in many countries and it's part of an increasing trend. Large numbers of people have news avoidance.

And it's understandable. The news is often depressing and awful. There are terrible and unjust things happening in the world. People feel angry about it, but they don't feel they can do anything about it. If you're like me, you may talk back to the radio or the television because it makes you cross. I certainly do that. And I'm not very forgiving in what I say either. I may sound a little crazy.

a little mad. But talking back to the TV or the radio is a way of releasing feelings which have nowhere else to go. Let's look today at news avoidance. Who listens to the news, who watches the news and who doesn't and why? You'll get to practice lots of great English vocabulary today.

and it's an interesting topic of English conversation. Don't forget if you're an advanced student of English and you would like to focus on your pronunciation skills, we have a pronunciation course on our website at Adept English, which will really help you. Go to our courses page and have a look at that today. So, often...

News avoidance is something that people do because it's better for their mental health. The news affects how they feel, in other words. If you know that watching the news is going to involve hearing about all sorts of inhumane and unjust things in the world...

which you have no power to do anything about, then you might just give watching the news a miss. You don't watch it, in other words. So if you find yourself doing news avoidance,

I'm with you largely. There is a counter argument though. Perhaps we have some duty to know and be aware of what's happening around the world. So there is another approach that lots of people also take. There are lots of people, and I probably fall into this category, who dose the news.

That's to dose, D-O-S-E. It means you give yourself a measured amount of something, like you would a medicine or a pill. They come in a dose. So I like to know what's going on, but I limit myself to a small daily dose of news only. If I watch the news, especially late at night, it makes me angry and frustrated, and then I can't go to sleep because of it.

And it can feel a bit futile. F-U-T-I-L-E. Lots of things I don't agree with, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about. I notice also there are quite big differences between the generations.

between people of different ages in who watches the news on television or listens on the radio or reads newspapers and who doesn't. And there are people, particularly amongst the younger generations, who don't watch the news at all. So-called millennials may watch some television news, but Gen Z on the whole watch very little.

I've done a previous podcast on the names we give in English to the different generations. That's something you can find on the lessons page of our website, adeptenglish.com, if you want help with that. So, I guess it tends to be the older generations who still watch mainstream news. People who were around when there was no internet.

So watching the nightly news was the only way to get your information unless you listened to the radio, which is an even older way of getting your news. These generations tend to be the ones who might listen to the nightly news or who might listen to the news on the radio in the morning. They're also the people who probably most trust the content of the news.

They trust what the news says. So there is another part to this as well. It's not just people looking after their mental health and it's not just the habits of different generations. I think there's also a problem in that people don't trust mainstream news like they used to. For me, since the COVID pandemic, I don't always trust what mainstream news is telling me. And I'm not alone in

Sometimes it's because the thinking is out of date. I find that particularly around health. If I want up-to-date health information, lifestyle advice, preventative medicine, online sources are much better as long as they're trusted sources. But sometimes people don't trust mainstream news, mainstream information, and they don't trust

because they think that the government uses this to get us to believe certain things. Governments want to influence our opinions. Sometimes they're telling us things not to inform us, but to make us think a certain way so that governments can gain support for what they want to do. If

this sounds a little conspiracy theorist to you, I would have agreed, except that I think I saw this in action around the COVID pandemic. The news and the conclusions on that are a lot different now from what they were at the time. Sometimes traditional news media, so newspapers, television, radio news, they're referred to as legacy media.

That's L-E-G-A-C-Y, meaning they're part of something that's old and perhaps less and less relevant. People who speak up for traditional news media are people like Craig Robertson, commenting in an article published by Reuters news agency recently. The link is in the transcript if you're interested. He says, and this is your opportunity to

practice more difficult English, declining news engagement may have negative implications for democratic participation and for combating misinformation, among other things. The news media provide people with the information that they may need in their daily lives, yet many are turning away. I agree there can be a problem with misinformation. People who are less discerning,

D-I-S-C-E-R-N-I-N-G, less careful about the quality of what they consume, can easily take on viewpoints or opinions that lack rational evidence. There's no proof. As I said, I've attached the link to the Reuters article by Craig Robertson. It contains some really interesting statistics. Their data suggests that the fall in people who don't

don't consume mainstream news is much greater amongst those who don't have university degrees. It quotes data on the percentage of people who've looked at online news in the last week, between 2015 and 2024. For people with university degrees, the figure drops from 81% only to 80%.

That's the percentage of people who've looked at online news in the last week. But for people without a degree, it's dropped from 76% in 2015 to only 69% in 2024. That's a much bigger drop. Is that people opting out or is that people finding what they believe to be the real truth online? The Reuters analysis says,

Sounds a note of caution, however. These drops, these declines in the number of people consuming traditional news, legacy news, well, it's not the same everywhere. For example, the decline, the drop, is much less in countries like Finland. Maybe they present the news differently there. Maybe the UK news needs to be a bit more like the Finnish news. And Finland has once again been voted the halfback

happiest nation on earth for about the eighth year running.

So clearly they're doing something right. I might argue the opposite to Craig Robertson though. I think mainstream and traditional news is full of all kinds of bias. And if you read online content and you do your research carefully, you're discerning in other words, then it can be truly educational. Sometimes it's closer to what's really going on and sometimes it's just more up to date. I

think there's a sort of panic in mainstream media. People are turning away from it, which may mean people are less informed than they once were, or that people's opinions are not based on fact. But also, I think the panic may be because mainstream media has less and less power. One particularly concerning trend, which the Reuters article and Reuters data showed,

Amongst 18 to 24-year-olds, the number of people who say they're interested or very interested in the news has dropped from 55% in 2015...

to just 33% in 2024. But against this rather alarmist data, I would say, how often did I watch the news when I was between the age of 18 and 24? If you're talking about the years when I was at university, probably very rarely indeed. So maybe things haven't changed that much. I think that the trend for not looking at the news is also happening

because lots of people think, well, it doesn't affect me or my life is quite comfortable or I'm not interested in politics. The idea that this affects all of us is perhaps not that popular at the moment. But I'm sure in the areas of the world where there's war and conflict and difficult situations and living conditions, where people are suffering, they really, really care

about the news. Maybe that will change in the UK at some point. And I do think that it's a problem if young people think that the news, in inverted commas, is what some influencer online had for breakfast or some celebrity marriage breakup.

I do tend to think that as citizens of the world, we have some duty to educate ourselves about what's going on around us, even if we carefully dose our news. But what is it that millennials and Gen Z are looking at instead?

Well, I think that what young people look at online is often quite random, naturally new and different and sometimes quite bizarre. A small example I found last week, which amused me and a trend I could understand because it made me laugh out loud or LOL as people still sometimes say online. There is a trend for sharing pictures of animals made in medieval times.

That's M-E-D-I-E-V-A-L. Made long ago, perhaps in monastery manuscripts. To us, they look funny and they make us laugh. And an article again on Australian ABC News.

had the title, Why Medieval Animal Art Has Gone Viral on Social Media. It discusses, and I quote, how there are trends online of people looking at super ugly medieval dogs and Instagram accounts devoted to weird medieval guys. It seems people can't get enough of these pictures.

and the stranger the better. When I looked at them, they made me laugh too. I have included the link in the transcript and I particularly like the one of the elephant. But these aren't news. Perhaps for the generations, millennials and Gen Z, who concern themselves greatly with mental health...

Looking at pictures of super ugly medieval dogs makes them feel better, whereas looking at mainstream news doesn't. And I certainly recognise that you, the audience of the Adept English podcast, really appreciate positive news some of the time. Not all that gloom and doom, as we say. And after all, we're not a news website. We're here to help people learn English. But we like an interesting topic.

Some big issues covered today. I'm really interested in what you think. Let us know. In English, of course. Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.