Many people say they avoid the news. The news doesn’t avoid them.

In our new election-focused issue, Josh Hersh contends with the problem of news avoidance. Network ratings are below what executives would expect at this point in the campaign cycle; as the journalist Brian Stelter put it, “The overarching emotion among voters is apathy and even burnout.” That could be a matter of circumstance—“a uniquely disliked set of candidates, a rare presidential rerun,” Hersh writes—but it may be that “something more fundamental, and therefore worrisome, is going on.” According to a public interest group called More in Common, there is an “exhausted majority” of Americans who feel unwilling or unable to keep up with the constant stream of coverage, even when it’s not an election year. “It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily tuned out,” Daniel Yudkin, a social psychologist who helps lead research at More in Common, says. “There’s just other issues and topics and questions that people are dealing with.” Many among the exhausted majority actually do interact with news, as Hersh notes—only indirectly, and often on social media.

Yesterday, Pew came out with data that illuminates Americans’ relationship to the news online. In a 2023 study, Pew found that half of US adults at least sometimes get their news from social media; this latest research surveyed ten thousand people about their internet habits, examining the way “specific platforms differ widely in structure, content, and culture.” The findings reveal how people perceive their relationships to news on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X. The last of these, formerly known as Twitter, is the only site for which respondents see keeping up with the news as a reason to log on. Among those who say they regularly follow news on X, eight in ten report getting it from news outlets or journalists on the site.

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