Researchers and practitioners increasingly believe that journalism must improve its relationship with audiences to increase the likelihood that people will consume and support news. In this paper, we argue that this assumption overlooks the importance of structural- and individual-level factors in shaping news audience behavior. Drawing on Giddens\' theory of structuration, we suggest that, when it comes to the amount of time that people devote to news, consumers\' choices are guided more by life circumstances than by news preferences. To illustrate this point, we draw on a combination of interview and audience analytics data collected when so many people\'s life circumstances changed: the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that people consumed more news during the early months of the pandemic than normal because (1) they had more time on their hands due to things like shelter-in-place orders, layoffs, and shifts to working from home and (2) they were more interested in understanding the coronavirus\' spread and risks as well as the preventative measures being pursued. We conclude that journalists should embrace \"journalistic humility,\" thereby acknowledging and accepting that they have much less control over the reception of their work than they would like to believe.

Entertainment television is an influential source of health information, including about reproductive health. We investigated the association between exposure to television plotlines about medication abortion on audience awareness and beliefs about medication abortion.
We administered a national cross-sectional online survey from December 2021 to January 2022 with a probability-based sample of people assigned female at birth. We asked respondents to select plotlines they had seen from a list of seven that portrayed medication abortion. Among the 3425 people who responded to plotline items, 3340 responded to our outcome measures. Using weighed multivariable analyses, we examined adjusted relationships between exposure to specific types of abortion plotlines and awareness of and beliefs about medication abortion medical safety.
We found that audience exposure to medication abortion plotlines in which the medication abortion was obtained from a clinic and portrayed as safe was associated with greater awareness of medication abortion compared to nonexposure (RR: 1.68; 95% CI: 1.17, 2.40). Exposure to plotlines that portrayed MA or self-managed MA as safe was associated with audience beliefs that medication abortion is safe.
This study demonstrates that the content of abortion plotlines and exposure to accurate information may be connected to audience awareness of and beliefs about abortion.
In a climate of misinformation about abortion, audience exposure to medically accurate television plotlines about medication abortion may be an effective way to increase awareness of medication abortion and influence beliefs about medication abortion safety.

Building on existing scholarship examining how audiences interpret reproductive experiences on film and television, we investigate how viewers make meaning of representations of motherhood, abortion, adoption, and surrogacy on the Hulu television miniseries Little Fires Everywhere. We recruited twenty-one participants to watch the series and conducted three virtual focus groups of seven women each. Based on the racial identities of the main characters in the series, we segmented these groups by race: one group each of white women, Black women, and Chinese American women. Focus groups were facilitated by moderators who matched the racial and ethnic backgrounds of each group. We asked participants about their overall reactions to the series, their impressions of various characters, and each reproductive health plotline. Participants expressed both tender and critical reactions to characters who endured motherhood, surrogacy and adoption, yet most participants were overtly critical of Lexie, the character who obtained an abortion. We argue that this is likely because the character of Lexie is written as largely unsympathetic, leaving audiences with little opportunity to form a parasocial relationship with her. We discuss the implications of this for cultural conversations and understandings of abortion more broadly.