News Consumption in the Changing Media Landscape [Part II]

This paper is the second in a series of analyses from ‘Reuters Digital News Report 2023,’ an international comparative study conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. The first article investigated how the emergence of various platforms has led to an increasingly fragmented social media environment.However, user dependence on these platforms continues to grow despite the disquiet about the spread of misinformation and disinformation and the concern over how algorithms select information. This paper examines how these changes in the media environment have affected people’s ’trust’ and ‘interest’ in the news and analyses ‘news avoidance’—a term used to describe people’s deliberate avoidance of the news. Unlike many countries, Japan has not experienced a declining trust in news and an increase in news avoidance. On the other hand, interest in the news continues to decline among the Japanese population, and the share of the population that is ‘disconnected’ from the news is the highest in the world. Furthermore, Japan has the lowest level of ‘participation’ in news of any country, and the lack of political discussion is also evident. The Japanese population appears to be passive and uninterested in the news, which has significant implications for the future of journalism. The level of support for public broadcasting is also low, and popular recognition of the role it plays in society is lower than in other countries.