Neither Absent nor Ambient: Incidental News Exposure From the Perspective of News Avoiders in the UK, United States, and Spain

Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news (“firsthand news”) and discussions of news (“secondhand news”), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized.