Record numbers of people are turning away from news. Is this due to general news fatigue, mental health worries or mounting concerns about the use of artificial intelligence (AI)? We dug deeper into the latest Digital News Report – and found some surprising facts about Switzerland. Check out our selection of newsletters. Subscribe here. The Digital News Report 2024, published by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute this week, documents the scale of these challenges across 47 countries, including Switzerland, based on surveys of around 100,000 people. A key takeaway this year is that news avoidance is at record levels. Almost four in ten (39%) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news. This is up from 29% in 2017. "You’ve had the pandemic [and] wars, so it's a fairly natural reaction for people to turn away from the news, whether it’s to protect their mental health or simply wanting to get on with the rest of their lives,” the report’s lead author Nic ...
