☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Senate approves cuts to PBS and NPR funding
- New from Pew Research Center: 6 facts about Fox News
- In other news: Fox News licenses Ruthless podcast
- Looking ahead: Nextdoor, local news outlets to join forces
- Chart of the week: Republicans far more likely than Democrats to trust and get news from Fox News
🔥 Featured story
Overnight, the Senate approved about $9 billion in cuts to federal spending, including over $1 billion in funding cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which funds NPR and PBS stations). The legislation now moves to the House, which is expected to approve the cuts ahead of the deadline this Friday.
Americans are more likely to support than oppose continuing federal funding for NPR and PBS, although many people don’t express either opinion, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. While 43% of Americans say that the federal government should continue to fund NPR and PBS, 24% say it should remove funding, and 33% say they are not sure.
There are large partisan differences on this question, with Republicans and Republican-leaning independents much more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to support removing federal funding (44% vs. 5%).
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
Fox News is an important news source for many Americans, but there are sharp partisan divides over whether people trust it. While 37% of U.S. adults say they trust Fox News as a news source, 42% say they distrust it. More Republicans trust Fox News than any other news source, while more Democrats distrust it than any other source.
Dive into the data about Fox News and who consumes news there in our new roundup.
📌 In other news
- Fox News licenses Ruthless podcast, hosted by former Republican staffers
- Substack raises money, invests in building a social network
- Trump sues Corporation for Public Broadcasting in renewed effort to remove board members
- Some foreign journalists in U.S. are taking steps to avoid scrutiny from Trump administration
- CNN correspondents attacked by Israeli settlers in West Bank
- BBC considers updating its license fee system as 300,000 UK households stop paying
- ABC News launching daily news show on Disney+
- How a Mennonite publication covers measles outbreaks
📅 Looking ahead
Social media site Nextdoor is launching a partnership with more than 3,500 local news providers to show users content from local newspapers and websites. Leaders at Nextdoor – which launched in 2011 and allows users to connect with other people who live in their neighborhood – are hoping the new relationships will bring more reputable information (and more users) to the site. The partnership may also direct more traffic to struggling local news outlets, industry leaders say.
Around half of U.S. adults (52%) say they get local news from online forums like Facebook groups or Nextdoor at least sometimes, according to a 2024 Center survey – up from 38% in 2018. This is considerably higher than the share of U.S. adults who often or sometimes get local news from daily or non-daily newspapers (33% and 30%, respectively).
Overall, 5% of U.S. adults say they regularly get news from Nextdoor, according to a separate 2024 survey on social media news consumption.
Dive deeper into the data on Americans’ relationship with local news.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from our new roundup of facts about Fox News. More than half of Republicans (56%) say they trust Fox News as a source of news, compared with 19% of Democrats who trust it, according to a March 2025 survey. On the other side, 21% of Republicans distrust the cable news network, while 64% of Democrats say the same.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang, Emily Tomasik, Joanne Haner, and Mary Randolph. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by Mia Hennen.
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