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The idealized view of the press as an institution that operates independently from private and political interests and tries to hold power to account is central to many journalists' selfconception and extensive academic scholarship on news. Yet surveys find significant numbers of citizens reject such views about the role of news in society. This article draws on in-depth interviews with a strategic sample of 83 news avoiders in Spain and the UK to investigate "folk theories" about the relationship between news and politics. Instead of believing in the watchdog ideal, many saw the news media as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, actively complicit with a distant and self-serving political and economic establishment. Instead of bringing important subjects to light, many saw the news as actively covering them up. The difference between professional and scholarly theories that stress the watchdog role on the one hand, and folk theories where this notion is completely absent on the other, highlights the specific cultural challenge journalism faces today. Cynicism about the role of news in society poses a problem that transcends the specific economic, political, and technological challenges that currently preoccupy many journalism professionals and institutions.

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Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news (“firsthand news”) and discussions of news (“secondhand news”), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized.

Do journalism subjects invariably feel betrayed and misrepresented by journalists, as Janet Malcolm claims in her seminal 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer? If not, what explains the ongoing appeal of her now famous conclusion? Based on interviews with 83 people who were named in newspapers in the New York City–area and a southwestern city, this article takes up these questions by putting journalism subjects’ own descriptions of their experiences with the journalistic process in dialogue with Malcolm’s central argument. I conclude that Malcolm’s conman–victim model for the journalist–subject relationship fails, in some key ways, to describe journalism subjects’ experiences; and yet, Malcolm does capture important emotional truths at the heart of the journalist–subject encounter. In the end, the hyperbolic versions of the journalist and subject she portrays may continue to resonate not because they are strictly accurate, but because they play a role in journalistic boundary work, simultaneously probing and reinforcing the boundaries of acceptable journalistic practice.