Understanding News Avoidance in China: A Systematic Review

Xuehua Zhao, Azahar Kasim, Zsuzsanna Toth, Reza Safitri

Abstract


With the rapid evolution of the digital news environment, audiences have access to an increasingly diverse range of channels for obtaining news. However, this highly selective media environment has not led to the anticipated increase in news consumption. Instead, it has contributed to a significant global increase in news avoidance. This phenomenon poses a serious challenge, as it may undermine the public’s knowledge base and weaken their capacity for civic engagement, making it a critical subject of concern in contemporary media scholarship. Although Western scholars have conducted extensive research on the motivations and mechanisms underlying news avoidance, there remains a notable gap in systematically summarising related studies within China's digital news environment. Addressing this gap, this study employs a systematic review of 24 empirical and theoretical studies published in both Chinese and English up to September 2024. The results show that the number of studies on news avoidance continues to grow, the research focus is on youth populations, quantitative methods dominate the field, and the theoretical framework is diverse. The thematic analysis identifies four core motives for news avoidance: emotion, cognition, trust, and selective preference, reflecting the complex mechanisms of audiences in emotion regulation, cognitive management, trust construction, and personalised choice. This study deepens and expands the multidimensional framework of news avoidance motives and promotes the progress of theories in the Chinese context. At the same time, a transparent research path combining systematic literature review and thematic analysis is proposed, which provides methodological guidance for subsequent academic exploration.

 

Keywords: News avoidance, digital news environment, avoidance motives, systematic review, thematic analysis.

 

https://doi.org/10.17576/JKMJC-2025-4102-28


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References


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