NEW YORK — When her husband activates the tv to look at news concerning the upcoming presidential electionsFor Lori Johnson Malveaux this is usually a signal to go away the room.
It can get an excessive amount of. She often goes to the TV in one other room to look at a movie on the Hallmark Channel or BET. She longs for something comforting and entertaining. And she has company.
While about half of Americans say they follow political news “extremely” or “very” closely, about 6 in 10 say they must limit the quantity of knowledge they eat about government and politics to avoid feeling overwhelmed or exhausted, in line with a brand new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research And USAFacts.
Don't worry: Malveaux plans to vote. She at all times does. “I'm just getting to the point where I don't want to hear the rhetoric anymore,” she said.
The 54-year-old Democrat said what bothers her most is hearing people on the news tell her that something she saw along with her own eyes – corresponding to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 – didn't really occur.
“I feel like I'm being manipulated. That's one way of putting it,” she said.
Sometimes it seems like a bombardment
Caleb Pack, 23, a Republican from Ardmore, Oklahoma, who works in the data technology industry, tries to maintain up with news through his phone's news feed, which is full of a wide range of sources, including CNN, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press.
But sometimes, says Pack, it seems like a bombardment.
“It's good to know what's going on, but both sides are going a little bit to extremes,” he said. “It just feels like it's a topic of conversation everywhere, and it's hard to escape it.”
Media fatigue shouldn’t be a brand new phenomenon. A Pew Research Center Survey conducted at the top of 2019 found that about two in three Americans feel fatigued by the flood of reports. That's concerning the same as a survey from early 2018. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, about six in 10 people felt overwhelmed by the flood of reports.
But this may be particularly acute with regards to political news. The AP-NORC/USAFacts poll found that half of Americans feel the necessity to limit their consumption of knowledge about crime or conflict abroad, while only about 4 in 10 limit their consumption of reports concerning the economy and the job market.
This is simple to know, as television channels corresponding to CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC provide a wealth of political discussion, and the Internet offers a wide selection of political news, sometimes complicated by disinformation.
“There's a flood of information,” says Richard Coffin, USAFacts' research and advocacy director, “and people are having a hard time figuring out what's true and what's not.”
Women usually tend to feel that they should limit media use
In the AP-NORC poll, about 6 in 10 men said they follow election and political news a minimum of “very” closely, compared with about half of girls. For all kinds of reports, not only political, women were more likely than men to say they’d to limit their media consumption, the poll found.
According to the survey, white adults are also more likely than black or Hispanic adults to imagine they should limit their media consumption related to politics.
“If it shows up on my page, when I'm on social media,” he said, “I just scroll past it.”
Sanders reported from Washington. David Bauder writes about media for AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.
The AP poll of 1,019 adults was conducted July 29-August 8, 2024. The sample got here from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.
Originally published:
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