Can news avoidance be considered a stable personal “trait,” adhering to a specific group of consistent news avoiders, or is it rather a volatile “state” reflecting temporal variations in audience practices? Based on a five-wave panel survey collected in Sweden during the coronavirus pandemic, we show that selective avoidance of news about the pandemic varies both between persons, representing consistency, and within persons, representing temporality. Drawing on the information utility model, we additionally show that both dimensions are related to audience preferences, specifically news interest, news media trust, and societal concerns. These results illustrate that the practice of selective news avoidance is not restricted to a specific group of people with limited news use but also represents a more fluid audience behavior of adjusting news consumption patterns in response to individual and contextual changes. However, as the correlates of the two dimensions are similar, the results stress the polarizing potential of news avoidance in democracy.

中文翻译：

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选择性新闻回避：一致性和暂时性

新闻回避是否可以被视为一种稳定的个人“特征”，坚持特定的一贯新闻回避者群体，或者它是一种不稳定的“状态”，反映了受众实践的时间变化？根据在冠状病毒大流行期间在瑞典收集的五波小组调查，我们表明，对有关大流行的新闻的选择性回避在人与人之间（代表一致性）和人内部（代表暂时性）都有所不同。利用信息效用模型，我们还表明这两个维度都与受众偏好相关，特别是新闻兴趣、新闻媒体信任和社会关注。这些结果表明，选择性新闻回避的做法并不局限于新闻使用有限的特定人群，而且代表了一种更加流动的受众行为，即根据个人和情境的变化来调整新闻消费模式。然而，由于两个维度的相关性相似，结果强调了民主中回避新闻的两极分化潜力。