It is commonly claimed that democracy can’t work unless you have journalism, and a free media at that. How are people to decide how to cast a vote if they don’t access independent, reliable information?

With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out.

Because, more than ever before, the people who decide the election will be those who are least engaged with professional news media – the kind of researched, fact-checked content that you are likely to find in the New York Times or, for that matter, the Guardian.

Forty-three per cent of US citizens avoid the news, according to the latest Digital News Report – a worldwide survey of media use conducted by the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.

Most of these people nevertheless encounter some news – not because of loyalty to a brand or because they actively seek out a preferred outlet, but because it comes at them, so to speak.

And what comes for free is either partisanly motivated, or funded by advertising – which means heavy with content pitched to draw eyeballs – sensationalism and clickbait.

It is the low news consumers on which the campaigning candidates are concentrating, and on which the result of the election depends.

There are significant things about news consumption that are different, this time around, from the last US election.

But before I get to how things have changed since 2020, the facts I have already given mean that all the controversies, among the politically engaged, about whether mainstream media are “sanewashing” Trump, or whether or not outlets such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times publish editorial endorsements of a candidate, won’t affect the election result.

It is a debate of principal........

© The Guardian