It’s been a couple of years since we covered the Digital News Report, but the 2023 installment released this month really gave me pause. Some of the findings about how Australian women – in particular young women – engage (or not) with news show we’re at risk of leaving the ‘important’ stuff for men to deal with. And right now is not the time we want to be turning away from the big discussions and decisions that will shape the future.
Quickly, what’s the Digital News Report? Every year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism runs an international study on the news and media usage across 33 countries, in partnership with key universities around the world. The same online survey is delivered to around 2000 people in each country. This allows us to not only get into the specifics of what Australian news consumption looks like, but compare, contrast and rank this to the behaviour and attitudes in other countries too. You can read the full 2023 Digital News Report here.
Findings on women & news
INTEREST & TRUST IN NEWS:
The headline takeaway is that Australian women have become significantly less interested in news overall. The proportion of women who say they are very interested in news has hit an all time low of 43%; compared to 62% of men who are very interested in news.
It means Australia has the biggest gender gap of all the countries measured. Since 2017, Australian women’s interest in news has declined by 16 points, compared to only a 6 point decline for men.
Australia also has the biggest gender gap for trust in news.
The thing is: overall, Australians trust in news has held pretty steady over the long-term. But trust among women has fallen since last year to 39% (-3 points). Men trust news significantly more, increasing 8 points to 48%.
All of this adds up the biggest gender gap in news consumption in the world. On top of that, Australian women consume the least amount of news out of all women in the global study. Ok, deep breath.
AVOIDANCE OF SPECIFIC TOPICS:
But the part that made me most concerned (and a bit sad) were the topics that women and men say they avoid. The Digital News Report found that men are much more likely to avoid news stories about social justice issues and climate change.
Women are more likely to avoid sport (ok, that’s personal preference) and national politics news. The study also had a section dedicated to financial and economic news, which found:
- Women are more likely to say they don’t pay attention to financial/economic news
- Women are twice as likely to say they don’t understand this type of news
- Women are much more likely to find it difficult to apply economic news to their daily life
Again, Australia has the highest gender gap in finance news of all countries in the study.
Have you read @NewsMediaRC‘s Digital News Report: Australia 2023 yet?
— Public Interest Journalism Initiative (@PIJI_Journalism) June 19, 2023
Among the findings: one in five Australians pays for online news, and readers want positive, solutions-focused news.
Read the full report online.https://t.co/OJmSaRJjaj
Why are women turning away from news?
Of course, none of this should be a huge surprise. It’s obvious why Australian women would be losing their trust and interest in the news in the year 2023.
For one thing, certain sections of the media have made the vilification of women part of their regular coverage. Let’s be more specific: the conservative viewpoints and decision making at NewsCorp, Nine Entertainment Co and SevenWest Media have run aggressively negative coverage of women in the public eye, while downplaying the wrongdoings of men.
The way news outlets write soft headlines about men who kill their wives and families has been long documented. It doesn’t inspire much trust.
There is social conditioning still at play here too – a patriarchal society reinforces that the ‘hard’ topics mostly covered in news are for the men to deal with, while the ‘soft’ news of entertainment, culture and lifestyle are for women. The study backs up those ideas.
Why we really need to fix this
The girlies don’t like news. Who cares, right? Whether we like it or not, the news plays a significant role in shaping the foundations of our society and influencing the decisions made about how it all works. If women opt out of this conversation – and news outlets are in constant conversation with their audiences – then we rob ourselves of the opportunity to be involved in shaping the world. Hopefully, for the better.
Audiences have a lot of power in shaping media coverage, more than they think. Powerful people pay very close attention to what’s reported in the news. Imagine how the heavily male-skewed audiences of political, economic and financial coverage influences the way news organisations cover those topics? And in turn, how that coverage influences the decisions politicians might make?
Even female journalists and editorial leaders within news outlets feel like they have to comply with what male audiences want. For example, independent news outlet Crikey recently had to take down an offensive opinion piece about Brittany Higgins by longtime columnist, Guy Rundle. In a letter explaining the decision, Crikey’s editor and editor-in-chief wrote: “As female journalists, we feel acute regret as the publishers of this piece. We’d be lying if we said that catering to a Crikey audience as women is not sometimes difficult.”
The comments on that letter prove the point – the overwhelmingly male readership really enjoyed Rundle’s victim-blaming piece and wants Crikey to publish more ‘challenging’ articles like it.
Should news or media outlets cave to whatever its audience wants to hear? It’s a hard question to answer. Journalism should report on what is of interest and importance to the public; sometimes that means listening to them, other times that means telling them.
What is clear is that if women don’t engage in news actively, vocally and (though I hate to say it) commercially, we’ll cut ourselves out of an important democratic institution.
How can we fix that?
The study also revealed that Australians don’t just want news to point out problems – they want it to offer solutions too. One of the authors of the report, Dr. Sora Park says Australia could learn a lot from Finland. The country not only has a very high news interest, but virtually no gender gap across any of the measured categories.
“One of the reasons is that they teach about news, media literacy, all of that in school,” Dr. Park explains. “Young people in Finland are taught what is news, and news versus misinformation, unvetted information. So when they reach adulthood, they acquire a good news habit. News consumption is more of a habit than anything else.”
Teaching news literacy in school would be effective and is badly needed in Australia, where mainstream media concentration and politicisation is high. But that’s a long term solution – what would help get women more engaged in political and economic news right now?
“Women say the avoid [these topics] because it has a negative impact on their mood. They say it’s wearing them out. The impact on their emotions is a much bigger issue than just generally being sick of the news,” Dr Park says.
It’s partly sociocultural; men are generally taught to isolate their feelings, which could mean they can better ‘handle’ the negativity in important news topics, allowing them to become more informed and empowered by the information. On the other hand, women are taught to be sensitive to the emotions of others, which could mean they turn away from news to protect their mental state, leaving them less informed and disempowered. Yeah, I hate it.
Some suggestions to address this are:
- Make political and economic news more solutions-focused
- Highlight positive developments, and,
- Surprisingly, make less video-based news!
I guess it’s less triggering to read the latest out-of-touch comments by a politician than it is to hear him say it.
Smart people read more:
A Journalist’s Advice on How to Read (and Understand) The News
Young people are abandoning news websites – new research reveals scale of challenge to media
The digital media bubble has burst. Where does the industry go from here?
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