Reuters Institute data shows 40% of people avoid news. The negativity bias amplifies negative headlines. Traders can exploit the gap with low-noise stocks like PNC (AlphaScore 60).
The Reuters Institute 2025 Digital News Report recorded the highest global news avoidance figure ever: 40% of people at least sometimes or often avoid the news. In Canada the rate reaches 69%. This is not a media consumption footnote. It is a structural shift in how information flows into asset prices.
When nearly half the population disengages from current events, the remaining audience skews toward those who seek out negative headlines. The marginal price mover operates on a biased sample of available data. Positive or neutral information is underweighted or ignored. The result is a systematic distortion in price discovery, especially on the downside.
People who avoid news cite consistent reasons: the news puts them in a bad mood, they feel overwhelmed, and they feel powerless to act. These are not trivial complaints. They reflect a cognitive architecture that was never designed for the scale of modern information.
Psychologists call this the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. The human brain weighs negative information more heavily than positive, attends to it faster, and remembers it longer. A study in Nature Human Behaviour examined 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates. Positive words had the opposite effect.
For most of human history, the threats a nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child. In 2026, the same neurological system is asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third, and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.
Researchers have introduced a clinical framework called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) – a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation, and disruption to daily functioning. A 2022 study found that 17% of American adults qualified as having severe PNC. Among that group, 61% reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with 6% of those without severe PNC.
For minority populations, the cognitive load is heavier. Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at one's own group, even when not the immediate target, has significant psychological impact. The option to simply stop watching is harder to exercise when the news is about a country of origin.
The market consequence is straightforward. When a large swath of the audience withdraws, the remaining news consumers are more likely to be heavy users who are also more sensitive to negative content. This concentration of attention on negative stories amplifies their market impact.
Consider a corporate earnings miss or a weak macroeconomic data point. The headline triggers a wave of selling. Because the pool of attentive traders is already skewed toward doom-scrolling, the selling may be outsized relative to the fundamental change. Buyers who are less engaged with news miss the opportunity to step in at a discount. The price overshoots.
The traders who remain engaged with news are the ones most likely to see and act on negative headlines. Positive or neutral information is underweighted or ignored entirely. The marginal price mover is driven by a biased sample of available data. This creates a feedback loop: negative news generates more negative price action, which generates more negative news coverage, which drives more avoidance.
Not all stocks are equally vulnerable to this distortion. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. (PNC) operates in the financial sector, where price movements are driven more by interest rate expectations, credit spreads, and regulatory filings than by viral headlines. The stock carries an AlphaScore of 60/100, with a label of Moderate on AlphaScala's proprietary scoring system. That score reflects a balanced risk-return profile, not an extreme catalyst.
The AlphaScore 60 places PNC in the middle of the spectrum. It is not a high-conviction momentum name, nor is it a distressed value trap. For a trader looking to avoid the news-bias distortion, a stock with a moderate score can serve as a low-noise holding. The price action is less likely to be whipped around by a single alarming headline because the fundamental drivers are transparent and widely reported by institutional sources.
Financial sector stocks like PNC benefit from structural liquidity. The sector is covered by dozens of analysts, and the key data points – net interest income, loan loss provisions, and capital ratios – are updated quarterly. The information set is predictable. Compare that with a consumer tech stock whose valuation depends on a product launch narrative or a social media stock whose sentiment can flip overnight. The financial sector's relative stability makes it a natural candidate for investors who want to minimize the cognitive load of constant news monitoring.
The practical takeaway for watchlist decisioning is this: monitor volume patterns on days when negative news hits a stock you track. If a stock drops on heavy volume following a negative headline, compare the decline to similar events in the stock's history. If the move is larger than the average reaction, it may reflect the news-bias premium rather than a genuine change in fundamentals.
One risk in applying this framework is that the trader becomes the victim of the same bias they are trying to exploit. A trader who believes all negative news is overblown may ignore legitimate red flags. The research on Problematic News Consumption also shows that people who avoid news can develop a blind spot for material risks. A 61% rate of feeling unwell among severe PNC consumers indicates that even among those who do engage, the experience is distressing. That distress can lead to impulsive selling or, conversely, to a stubborn refusal to sell when the thesis breaks.
The solution is to rely on structured fundamental data rather than headlines. Use quarterly reports, regulatory filings, and macroeconomic releases as the primary decision inputs. Treat news headlines as a secondary signal, one that provides timing but not direction.
Final point: The 40% news avoidance figure is likely structural, not cyclical. Younger demographics, in particular, are less likely to trust traditional news sources. This trend will persist even as the news cycle shifts. For the individual investor, the smart response is not to withdraw from information. It is to build a filter that separates attention-grabbing content from decision-relevant data. Stocks like PNC, with a moderate AlphaScore and a clear fundamental story, can be the anchor in that filtered approach.
For more on how structural market shifts affect watchlist decisions, see AlphaScala's stock market analysis and the PNC stock page.
Prepared with AlphaScala editorial tooling from the source reporting linked above. Indexable analysis may include a cited Alpha Score value. Publishing checks screen each story before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.