ABSTRACT

This study uses an inductive, qualitative approach to examine the perspectives of lower- and middle-class people in the United Kingdom who regularly access little or no professionally-produced news. Findings suggest that people’s preexisting perspectives about what news is (anxiety-inducing) and offers for them (little practical value) play an important role in shaping attitudes toward news and subsequent behavior. These perspectives highlight the importance of emotional dimensions of news use beyond its presumed value as a source of information. While political communication scholarship has often treated news consumption as the cornerstone of good citizenship, we find avoiders hold uneven, weakly internalized norms about a perceived duty to stay informed, in part because they anticipate news will make them anxious without being relevant to their lives, resulting in limited engagement with news, and by extension, civic and political affairs. Promoting more informed societies requires grappling with these entrenched perspectives.

摘要

本研究采用归纳、定性的方法来考察英国中低阶层人士的观点，这些人经常接触很少或根本不接触专业制作的新闻。研究结果表明，人们对新闻是什么（引起焦虑）和提供给他们的信息（几乎没有实际价值）的预先存在的观点在塑造对新闻的态度和随后的行为方面发挥着重要作用。这些观点强调了新闻使用的情感维度的重要性，超出了其作为信息来源的假定价值。虽然政治传播学术经常将新闻消费视为良好公民的基石，但我们发现回避者对保持知情的义务持有不平衡、内化薄弱的规范，部分原因是他们预计新闻会让他们感到焦虑，但与他们的生活无关，从而导致对新闻的参与有限，进而影响到公民和政治事务。促进更知情的社会需要与这些根深蒂固的观点作斗争。