Two-thirds of US adults tuning out political news, poll finds 

After a year dominated by a relentless and intense United States presidential election campaign, Americans are looking for a break from political news, a new poll suggests.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on Thursday found that 65 percent of US adults said they felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government “due to information overload [and] fatigue”.

Broken down by political affiliation, about seven in 10 Democratic Party voters – 72 percent – said they were taking a step back from political news. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans said the same as did 63 percent of independents.

“People are mentally exhausted,” Ziad Aunallah, a 45-year-old in San Diego, California, told AP. “Everyone knows what is coming, and we are just taking some time off.”

The survey, conducted in early December, comes weeks after Republican Donald Trump secured a victory in the November 5 presidential election over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Media coverage focused on Trump and Harris as they spent months on the campaign trail, crisscrossing the country to hold rallies and meet with voters.

Since Trump’s victory, the US president-elect – and his plans for once he gets into the White House next month – have dominated the news cycle.

But like the AP-NORC poll found, US television news ratings show that many Americans aren’t tuning in as 2024 comes to a close.

After election night through December 13, the prime-time viewership of the MSNBC television news network was an average of 620,000 households, down 54 percent from the pre-election audience this year, the Nielsen company said. CNN’s average of 405,000 viewers was down 45 percent over the same period.

There was a marked difference, however, when looking at the numbers at the Fox News channel, a favourite network for Trump supporters.

There, the postelection average of 2.68 million viewers is up 13 percent, Nielsen said.

Since the election, 72 percent of the people watching one of those three cable networks in the evening were watching Fox News, compared with 53 percent prior to Election Day.

Political fatigue and a need to disengage from the news is not a new phenomenon in the US, where polarisation and divisive rhetoric have skyrocketed in recent years.

In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that about two-thirds of Americans reported feeling “worn out” by the amount of news available to them, nearly the same percentage of people who said they experienced news fatigue in 2018.

Pew also reported in September last year that 65 percent of people surveyed said they always or often felt exhausted when thinking about politics while 55 percent said they always or often felt angry.

The same survey found about eight in 10 Americans responded negatively when asked to describe the state of politics in the country with many opting for the word “divisive” to explain the situation.

Arash Javanbakht, an associate professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University in the US state of Michigan, has explained that “the politics of fear” is among the top three reasons why many Americans are disengaging from politics.

“The COVID-19 pandemic, more than a decade of intense political stress, polarizing social media and wars across the world, as well as public disillusionment with US politics and media, have led, I believe, to many people experiencing burnout and learned helplessness,” he wrote in The Conversation this month.