News Avoidance Reached 68 Percent in Australia, and Coverage Still Works
Over two-thirds of Australians, 68 percent, report avoiding the news, according to the Digital News Report: Australia 2026. Avoidance runs highest among 18 to 24 year olds at 83 percent, women at 71 percent, and people who distrust news at 80 percent.
Those numbers get quoted as evidence that media relations has stopped working. The rest of the same research says something different, and more useful.
What does news avoidance actually mean?
News avoidance describes people who deliberately reduce or turn away from news consumption, either sometimes or often. It covers someone who scrolls past political coverage as well as someone who has stopped reading news entirely. The 68 percent figure is a measure of selective withdrawal rather than a measure of people who never see journalism.
The distinction is important for anyone planning coverage. A person avoiding news about conflict and politics may still read industry publications, professional newsletters, and the business section for work. Avoidance is concentrated in categories that produce fatigue.
Where is trust, and where is it not?
Australians trust their own news sources at 54 percent, over twice their trust in news on social platforms at 21 percent or from AI chatbots at 19 percent. Globally the picture is similar, with the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 recording trust in news from search engines at 32 percent, social platforms at 22 percent, and AI answers at 20 percent.
Read those two lines together and the strategic picture is clear. Australians hold a low opinion of AI-generated news and a much higher opinion of the mastheads and programmes they have chosen. At the same time, AI answers are becoming a primary route to information, which produces a market where the most used channel is the least trusted.
Concern about misinformation supports the same reading. Seventy-seven percent of Australians report concern about online misinformation, up three points from the previous year.
What does this change for communications?
Four consequences follow.
Earned coverage gains value as a trust signal. When AI answers and social feeds carry a trust discount, a claim attributed to a masthead the reader has chosen carries a premium. The scarcity of trusted channels raises the price of being in one.
Reach and influence separate further. A story that reaches two million people through a feed and a story that reaches 40,000 through a trade title do different jobs. The second is more likely to be believed and acted on by the people who matter to a B2B company.
Trade and specialist media outperform their audience numbers. Professional readers do not avoid news about their own industry. Avoidance is a general-news phenomenon, and specialist publications sit largely outside it.
Owned channels carry more of the load. A newsletter someone chose to receive behaves like a trusted source, because the choice is what creates the trust.
Who is avoiding, and why?
Avoidance concentrates in identifiable groups, and the reasons behind it are consistent enough to plan around.
Younger audiences avoid most. At 83 percent among 18 to 24 year olds, avoidance is close to universal in the cohort that most B2B companies assume they will reach through general media in a decade's time. Reaching them means going where they already are, which is professional communities, creators, newsletters, and podcasts rather than mastheads.
Women report higher avoidance than men, at 71 percent. People who distrust news avoid at 80 percent, which is close to a definition: distrust and avoidance describe the same withdrawal from two directions.
The stated reasons cluster around volume, negativity, and a sense that consumption changes nothing. That points at a content decision before a channel decision. Material that is useful, specific, and actionable sits outside the pattern that drives people away.
Does this contradict the shift to AI search?
No, and holding both facts at once is the whole discipline. Australians increasingly encounter information through AI answers, and they trust those answers least. Both statements are true, and they point at the same conclusion.
An AI answer becomes credible to a sceptical reader when it cites a source that reader already trusts. The retrieval system reaches the audience. The masthead behind the citation supplies the belief. A communications programme that pursues earned coverage in trusted publications is therefore doing AI visibility work and trust work with the same placement.
The failure mode is treating them as competing budgets. Companies that move spend from media relations to content production optimised for retrieval end up widely retrieved and weakly believed.
What still gets read?
Four categories hold up against the avoidance trend, and each has a practical implication for a communications programme.
Work-relevant information. Professionals read about their own industry because their job requires it. Trade titles, sector newsletters, and analyst commentary sit largely outside general-news avoidance.
Information with a decision attached. Anything a reader needs in order to act, including regulatory change, pricing, and supplier news, gets consumed regardless of general fatigue.
Chosen voices. An individual whose commentary someone opted into carries the trust of that choice, which is why spokesperson-led programmes have become more effective as institutional trust has fallen.
Public service media. Half of Australian news consumers, 49 percent, say public service media plays a positive role in Australian life, which keeps the ABC and SBS unusually valuable placements in a low-trust market.
How should a company plan around avoidance?
Target chosen channels. Publications, newsletters, and programmes that the audience opted into carry the trust premium. General-audience reach does not.
Give people a reason to read rather than a reason to react. Avoidance is driven by fatigue and negativity. Useful, specific, non-alarmist material is what avoiders still consume.
Weight trade coverage higher in reporting. A coverage report that ranks by audience size will systematically undervalue the placements doing the work.
Build owned channels deliberately. A subscriber list is an audience that has already made the trust decision.
Check what AI answers cite about your category. The publications the engines lean on are the ones worth pursuing twice.
What should a coverage report look like now?
Most coverage reports rank placements by audience reach, which in a high-avoidance market measures the wrong thing. Three additions make the report useful again.
Add a trust weighting. A placement in a publication the target audience chose to read outranks a larger placement in a general outlet, and the report should say so instead of leaving the reader to infer it.
Add a retrieval column. Whether a placement is being cited by AI engines when buyers ask category questions is measurable, and it separates coverage that keeps working from coverage that peaked on publication day.
Add a description check. Whether each piece described the company accurately is the input to everything downstream, and it takes a minute per placement to record.
Does avoidance mean fewer opportunities?
Fewer general-audience opportunities, and about the same number of the ones a B2B company should want. The mastheads have contracted, and the specialist titles, professional newsletters, industry podcasts, and analyst channels that reach a working audience have held up or grown.
What has changed is the effort required per placement. Reaching an audience that has chosen its sources means being useful to those specific sources rather than issuing material broadly and hoping. That is slower, and it produces coverage that a sceptical reader will act on.
What does this mean for spokespeople?
A market with low trust rewards spokespeople who are specific and available, and punishes those who sound like a company statement. Australians distrusting news at 80 percent avoidance are not going to be persuaded by polished messaging, and the executives who cut through are the ones who answer the question asked.
Consistency also compounds. A named person who has commented credibly on the same subject for three years becomes a source the audience recognises, which is a small, durable trust asset that no campaign can buy quickly.
What should a company stop measuring?
Two habits survive from a period when reach was the point and are now actively misleading.
Advertising value equivalency, which prices coverage as though it were an advertisement, values a large untrusted placement above a small trusted one. In a market where trust is the scarce input, that inverts the ranking.
Raw placement counts reward volume, and volume is what a shrinking, sceptical, avoidance-prone audience responds to worst. A programme optimised for count will produce 60 low-value mentions instead of six that change a buyer's mind.
Where Third Hemisphere fits
Third Hemisphere works across Media Coverage and Marketing for AI as one programme, on the view that trusted earned coverage and AI retrieval are the same investment viewed from two ends. The agency's media relations insights cover the practical side of pursuing it.
The takeaway
Australians avoid general news at 68 percent and trust AI answers at 19 percent, while trusting their own chosen news sources at 54 percent, which makes coverage in publications an audience has opted into the most valuable placement available. The strategy that follows is narrow and unfashionable: fewer, better-targeted placements in trusted and specialist titles, supported by owned channels people chose to receive. Companies rebuilding a programme around that can get in touch.