Why we need to bring news back to the dinner table

With hollowed out newsrooms, AI, misinformation and conspiracies running rife, an unwillingness to bring up anything in the news is becoming de riguer for too many families going into the holiday season. But could our reluctance to discuss news at the dinner table be making a bad problem worse and depriving our kids of a valuable opportunity to learn about the world around them?

Even without all the doom-and-gloom dominating global headlines, it’s become apparent that news participation is declining. A study by researchers based at Oxford University and the University of Zurich found that participation in news has drastically plummeted between 2015 and 2022 across 46 countries around the world. Countries with high political polarisation and those with low trust in news were the most likely to turn away from news participation including commenting on mainstream news stories.

Digital app Readly’s global surveys found the lack of participation in news is trickling down to our children as well. Despite the universally acknowledged advantages of reading, 62% of Americans did not read newspapers, magazines, or journalistic content to their children. In Australia that figure was a similar 60%, with 30% of parents and grandparents not reading to children at all.

Readly’s most recent Ipsos poll in the UK found that 32% of Britons ‘never have arguments or discussions during the holidays’. For those that do discuss controversial matters, politics was the topic that led to the most heated and destructive arguments at the table 30% of the time.