POLITICO Nightly: The ‘News Avoiders’ who could decide 2024

By Joanne Kenen San Francisco Chronicle journeyman pressman Ray Lussier pulls two freshly printed copies of the San Francisco Chronicle at one of the newspaper's printing facilities. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images TUNED OUT — If you are reading this edition of Nightly, you are probably not a News Avoider. And yes, News Avoiders are a thing. Even during a wild, close presidential election where unknown numbers of Americans are compulsively checking and rechecking their favorite polling aggregator. Roughly 8 percent of the U.S. population are news avoiders, according to the University of Minnesota’s Benjamin Toff, co-author of a book called “Avoiding the News.” News avoiders aren’t just overloaded busy people, juggling family and jobs, who lack bandwidth to do much more than skim the headlines. Time is one reason people may skimp on news but it’s not the main reason that people avoid it completely, Toff told Nightly in an interview this week. No, news avoiders are literally that — people who avoid hearing, seeing, or reading the news. They figure if something is really really really important, Toff said, “the news will come to them.” For instance, word of the attempted golf course assassination of former president Donald Trump the other day may have “come to” them. But since Trump wasn’t harmed, they “won’t spend a lot of time dwelling on it.” “They may have thought, ‘so, he wasn’t actually shot… End of story,’” Toff said. There’s no prototypical news avoider but they do have certain common traits. They describe themselves as having high levels of anxiety — and news contains much to be anxious about. They are disconnected, thinking that most of the news “has nothing to do with them.” And they are distrustful, with a tendency to equate news and politics, and to look at journalists and politicians as more or less one and the same, or in cahoots. They see both groups as more interested in serving themselves than serving the public. They are mostly young and low-income — and their distancing from the news and conversations around news may perpetuate their low-income status. They are slightly more likely to be politically conservative, but plenty are not. More are women than men, possibly because women do have more of a time crunch because of family obligations. There is not a lot of difference among racial or ethnic groups. Most news avoiders are not part of, and likely did not grow up in, high news consuming communities. They don’t work at desk jobs, where there’s time to surf news sites and where coworkers talk about current events. “They were sort of on their feet and service industry jobs, or they were working with builders or other kinds of roles where that just wasn't even an option,” noted Toff, who is now an associate professor at Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication. But, we asked, news is everywhere. How can people avoid something so omnipresent? Other than squeezing their eyes shut and plugging their fingers in their ears? It turns out it’s actually pretty easy. It might be those of us who are big news consumers who are the outliers. Toff told us that some news avoiders do get a bit of incidental exposure, say if a TV is on in the background at a place where they grab lunch. Or headlines they glimpse while commuting (if anyone still reads the news on a bus or subway nowadays.) But most truly avoid the news and they tend to consume little to no social media, further insolating them from current events. Given that the social media platforms are now emphasizing less journalism, it’s easier for them to keep news-feeding algorithms at bay. Some do turn to alternative non-journalistic sources of information, like Infowars. But even that’s not the norm for the true avoiders. Toff, who did much of the research for his book several years ago while at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, has continued to study avoidance and the related challenge of declining trust in media. Most of what he finds, including that more and more people get their news in short snippets or from sites like Tiktok, worries him, as does the emphasis news outlets place on “engaging” their members and subscribers, rather than redoubling efforts to engage with the broader world. It makes him worry about the future of journalism — and for an interconnected democratic society for that matter. “There are things that journalism does for society that no other institution can do, but it can really only survive if it has support from the public,” Toff said. “I just worry that the growing disconnection from journalism doesn't bode well for the future.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @JoanneKenen . What'd I Miss? — Port strike ends, defusing a political time bomb: A dockworkers strike that threatened the American supply chain weeks before an election is over just days after it began and before inflicting pain on consumers . The union that represents tens of thousands of East Coast dockworkers and the shipping industry reached a tentative agreement on wages and are extending an expired contract through Jan. 15, 2025. — NYPD arrests New York lawmaker with ties to Adams: Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs was arrested and taken into custody by the New York City Police Department today in his East Harlem district, according to witnesses. About 11 police cars pulled up while Gibbs was sitting with his brother in a car on Lexington Avenue, just outside the James Weldon Johnson Community Center, according to Frederick Thomas, a security guard with the New York City Housing Authority. Cops from the Strategic Response Group patted down Gibbs, put him in handcuffs and drove him away from the scene. — Watchdog group suggests Biden fire Trump-appointed DHS inspector general: For four years, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, appointed by former President Donald Trump, has criticized President Joe Biden’s administration for lax immigration enforcement. Now, a confidential watchdog report delivered to the White House on Wednesday is accusing the inspector general of abuse of authority and substantial misconduct — and it suggests the president fire him . A panel of other inspectors general from across the federal government, after investigating DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari for years, has concluded that Biden should discipline him “up to and including removal.” Nightly Road to 2024 SITTING IT OUT — Vice President Kamala Harris suffered a blow today as the union representing more than 300,000 career firefighters and emergency responders declined to make a presidential endorsement , two weeks after the International Brotherhood of Teamsters made a similar decision.  Leaders of the International Association of Fire Fighters gathered this week and determined “by a margin of 1.2%” against picking a candidate, according to General President Edward Kelly. Harris has won the endorsements of an overwhelming number of unions. But it’s the second notable union-related setback in recent weeks for her campaign, which is strongly banking on organized labor to boost its outreach to working-class voters on her behalf — particularly in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. SPEAK ON IT — Since being tapped as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz has had to explain a growing number of inaccurate statements — and at times embellishments — about his past. They range from comments about his military service to his visit to Hong Kong more than three decades ago to clarifying that his family didn’t specifically use in vitro fertilization. It’s unclear whether Walz’s verbal errors will undercut his credibility with voters. But the need to continually clean up those claims could politically hurt Walz and Harris, who are locked in a tight race with Donald Trump and JD Vance. And in some cases, key members of Harris’ circle weren’t aware of some of the inaccurate statements until they became public despite the vetting process, according to four people familiar with the conversations. RENEWED EFFORT — The Harris campaign is making a new push for Muslim voters , as it tries to hold off significant defections of left-leaning voters in swing states angry over the vice president’s position on Israel amid a growing military conflict in the Middle East. Gov. Tim Walz is set to speak at a virtual Muslim voter event this evening organized by Emgage Action, a Muslim advocacy group that recently endorsed Kamala Harris and Walz while citing serious reservations about their stance on Israel. The invite, shared with POLITICO, said “both presidential candidates have left our community with difficult choices: one threatening the fabric of democracy, the other enabling atrocities in Gaza.” REUNITED — Donald Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will receive a briefing on hurricane destruction in the battleground state today — the first joint appearance by the two men since 2020 . Trump, who spent much of the last four years denigrating Kemp for not helping him overturn Trump’s loss in Georgia during the last presidential election, changed his tune in recent months as the current race for president became increasingly close. AROUND THE WORLD Iran's new $2 billion dollar oil refinery at Bandar-Abbas. | Jamshid Bairami/AFP via Getty Images FEEL THE ENERGY — The risk of an escalating war between Israel and Iran is testing the global market’s faith that crude oil prices would be insulated from a widening of hostilities across the Middle East. For decades, conflicts in the oil-rich region frequently spooked oil markets and weighed on the economy. But now, Middle East military skirmishes are causing more shrugs than drastic price spikes — a welcome development for the Biden administration, which has faced political criticism from Republicans over fuel prices and is trying to contain the fallout from Iran’s launch of nearly 200 missiles into Israel on Tuesday. Increased oil production from the United States, Brazil and other places in the past two decades has diversified the global fuel supply, which means oil markets rely less on Middle East shipments that Tehran could disrupt, energy and security analysts told POLITICO. “For those of us who spend our lives looking at the effects of a [Middle East] crisis on oil prices, obviously the past 10-plus years have been a complete washout,” said Michael Knights, an analyst at the think tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “No matter how insane the thing is, it has a minimal impact on oil. The market has proven time and time again it can make up shortfalls.” Nightly Number 9 years The amount of time in prison that former Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to today for a data-breach scheme spawned from the rampant false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race. RADAR SWEEP NO ESCAPE — On the internet, pornography is everywhere . A report from BYU estimated that 12 percent of all websites were dedicated to porn. And that’s not counting sites like X, which have huge problems with pornography bots that can sometimes feel like they’re taking over the site. So how does this affect young Americans, who spend more time online than older people? For one, in general young women in particular have fewer moral objections to porn than their elders. But they also have a much more complicated relationship with the subject, sometimes trying fastidiously to avoid pornography or even the hint of sexual content. For the newsletter American Storylines, Daniel Cox looks into the issue, publishing a study and speaking with younger Americans about their experiences. Parting Image On this date in 1995: Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton speak at a news conference in New York's Times Square after the verdict was read in the O.J. Simpson trial. | Mitch Jacobson/AP Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here .   Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh   Follow us

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