NEW YORK– When her husband turns on the television to hear news about the upcoming presidential election, it is often a signal for Lori Johnson Malveaux to leave the room.
It can become too much. Often she goes to a TV in another room to watch a movie on Hallmark Channel or BET. She longs for something comforting and entertaining. And she has company in that.
While about half of Americans say they follow political news “extremely” or “very” closely, about six in 10 say they need to limit the amount of information they consume about government and politics to avoid feeling overloaded or tired, according to a new study. survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts.
Make no mistake: Malveaux plans to vote. She always does that. “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 she worries most when she hears people on the news telling her that something she saw with her own eyes — like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — didn’t really happen.
“I feel like I’m being lit by gas. That’s the way to say it, she said.
Caleb Pack, 23, a Republican from Ardmore, Oklahoma, who works in IT, tries to stay informed through the news feeds on his phone, which is filled with a variety of sources including CNN, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press.
Yet it sometimes seems like a bombardment, says Pack.
“It’s good to know what’s going on, but both sides are going a bit extreme,” he said. “It feels like it’s a topic of conversation everywhere, and it’s hard to escape it.”
Media fatigue is not a new phenomenon. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late 2019 found that roughly two in three Americans felt exhausted by the amount of news out there, about the same as a poll in early 2018. During the 2016 presidential campaign, about six in ten people overload themselves with campaign news.
But it can be especially acute for news related to politics. The AP-NORC/USAFacts poll found that half of Americans feel the need to limit their consumption of information about crime or foreign conflicts, while only about four in 10 Americans limit news about the economy and employment.
It’s easy to understand, with television channels like CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC full of political talk and a wide range of political news online, sometimes complicated by misinformation.
“There is an overabundance of information,” says Richard Coffin, USAFacts director of research and advocacy, “and people are having a hard time figuring out what is true or not.”
In the AP-NORC survey, about six in 10 men said they follow news about elections and politics at least “very” closely, compared with about half of women. Across all types of news, not just politics, women are more likely than men to report the need to limit their media consumption, the study found.
White adults are also more likely than black or Hispanic adults to say they should limit media consumption on politics, the poll found.
Kaleb Aravzo, 19, a Democrat, gets basic news by listening to National Public Radio at home in Logan, Utah, in the morning. Too much politics, especially when on social media sites like TikTok and Instagram, can cause anxiety and depression.
“If it pops up on my page when I’m on social media,” he said, “I just scroll past it.”
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Sanders reported from Washington. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him up http://x.com/dbauder.
The AP survey of 1,019 adults was conducted from July 29 to August 8, 2024, using a sample from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points for all respondents.
