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By Joe Arney

If you’ve taken a holiday from the news after Election Day, you’re not alone—an Associated Press poll released late last year found about two-thirds of U.S. adults were limiting their consumption of political and government news.

Experts from the 51�Թ��� said the troubling trend is probably driven by a combination of exhaustion and how the media covered the presidential and down-ballot campaigns.

“Even if you feel that, from a civic standpoint, you need to be more engaged, you can’t live your whole life in that hyper-excited space all of the time,” said Elizabeth Skewes, an associate professor of journalism at the College of Media, Communication and Information. “I think we need to breathe again. Yes, the next Trump presidency will affect our daily lives—but breathlessly reading every story doesn’t help.”

That wasn’t the tack many Americans took in Donald Trump’s first term. In his campaign and through the early years of his presidency, the “Trump bump” in ratings and circulation gave new life to legacy media outlets. But that faded as his presidency waned, and hasn’t recovered even as he prepares to be inaugurated.

“First of all, we’ve had nine years of this coverage, and it’s never stopped,” Skewes said. “Then, we’ve been through COVID, and we’re exhausted. I think people will eventually re-engage with the news, but I expect it will be at a lower level.”

Reverting to an established pattern

That’s something Skewes, a former staff and freelance reporter, knows quite a bit about: Some of her earliest research looked at how the media covered U.S. presidential campaigns, especially since no one—the public, the candidates, even the reporters—liked it.

Sound familiar?

“For quite a few election cycles, we’ve heard about how journalism should do this better,” she said. “But the media tend to revert to pattern—to covering whatever the outrageous thing of the day is, and the legacy media will never be able to do that as well as things like social media or podcasts, because they have less responsibility to be factually correct.”

To survive, news organizations should focus on building audience, Skewes said, instead of chasing chaos. They can do that not by focusing on being first, but on providing accuracy, context and clarity in an age of confusion.

In other words, not by breaking the news, but by putting it back together.

“We need to keep fact checking, but also cover all the other stuff—those governance stories, where quiet decisions have a huge impact on our lives—instead of just the latest thing Trump said that is too weird to believe, like trying to buy Greenland,” she said. “Instead of letting that grab the headlines, we need serious outlets to look behind the scenes and ask what’s happening while we’re distracted with the latest unbelievable thing Trump says.”

For Mike McDevitt, a professor of journalism at CMCI, everyone has an obligation to follow the news on a regular basis—though, he said, “I sense it’s healthy for people to tune out” a polarizing figure like Trump.

“But a related interpretation to what’s happening is that if people have internalized politics as entertainment, then it’s understandable if they tune out for more appealing types of entertainment,” said McDevitt, a former editorial writer and reporter.

The long game of retraining readers

Getting consumers to understand that, though, is a long game, Skewes said—one that will play out against the deeper-pocketed tech industry and the social media giants.

“I don’t know how we get to the point where most of the public realizes, ‘I’m just getting stuff that is basically Twinkies for the brain, and I need to find more reliable places to get news, because accurate information matters,’” she said. “That’s a long play. We’ve got to retrain people to understand the difference between news and content.”

It’s a long game, but we’ll have to find answers quickly, because the economics of the news business continue to flounder. In 2024, 130 newspapers closed their doors, according to the Local News Initiative from Northwestern University. That’s more than two newspapers disappearing each week.

And when reporters are no longer there to ask probing questions and search for the truth—well, it puts a new spin on a bad news day.

“When people aren’t paying attention to the media, the media aren’t paying attention to the thing—and that’s when you see real changes to federal, state and local policy that dramatically change things,” she said. “Without that accountability, it’s easier to do the wrong thing.”

For all those warning lights, Skewes is hopeful that the longer-term future will be less chaotic and more civil than she expects to see in the next four years.

“I love politics—I covered it, grew up with it—and I’m more hesitant now to even say something offbeat the political world, because I don’t know how other people are going to respond,” she said. “But I think most Americans are tired of everything being so fraught. I really do believe that, eventually, things will calm down.”