U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided
As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Elisa Shearer is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center, where she focuses on U.S. media consumption and attitudes. She is the author of reports on news consumption on social media, U.S. media polarization, Americans’ changing media habits, and media sector data. She has a master’s degree in communication studies from Georgetown University.
Publications
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Americans Are Wary of the Role Social Media Sites Play in Delivering the News
Getting news from social media is an increasingly common experience; nearly three-in-ten U.S. adults do so often.
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Older Americans, Black Adults and Americans With Less Education More Interested in Local News
Older Americans, black adults and those with a high school education or less show considerably more interest in local news than their counterparts.
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Lessons learned from more than 20 years of asking about Americans’ online habits
We’ve been asking Americans about their online news habits since the mid-1990s. Since then, the ways people get news online have changed a lot — and so have the ways we ask about it.
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short reads
Social media outpaces print newspapers in the U.S. as a news source
One-in-five U.S. adults often get news via social media, slightly higher than the 16% who often do so from print newspapers.
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report
Western Europeans Under 30 View News Media Less Positively, Rely More on Digital Platforms Than Older Adults
Younger adults in eight Western European countries are about twice as likely as older adults to get news online than from TV. They also are more critical of the media’s performance and coverage of key issues.
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News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2018
Most Americans continue to get news on social media, even though many have concerns about its accuracy.
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In Western Europe, Public Attitudes Toward News Media More Divided by Populist Views Than Left-Right Ideology
Across eight Western European countries, people with populist leanings have more negative attitudes about the news media than do those with non-populist views.
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short reads
Americans interested in the environment are the most likely to feel civic obligation to follow science news
While there are many reasons that Americans get science news, the most common driver of attention to science news is curiosity, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study. But people are also motivated to seek out science news for different reasons depending on the issues they care about most, with the environment being a prime example.
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News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017
Today, 67% of U.S. adults get at least some news on social media. Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat serve as sources of news for more of their users, though Facebook still leads as a source of news for Americans.
