The Chicago Defender on July 9. The newspaper, founded in 1905 to serve Chicago’s black community, published its final print edition the following day. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
This week, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) holds its annual meeting in Miami. The meeting comes amid increased attention to the role of black journalists in the United States and recent changes to black-oriented news media organizations, such as a decision by the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper founded in 1905, to cease printing (though it will remain available online).
Pew Research Center has studied black Americans’ attitudes toward the news media – as well as their news consumption habits – for years. We have also examined minority representation within U.S. newsrooms. To coincide with the NABJ conference, here are seven key facts about black Americans and the news media:
1Black adults stand out for their trust in local news organizations. One-in-three say they have a lot of trust in the information they get from local news organizations, higher than the share of whites who say the same (27%). When it comes to national news organizations, blacks (23%) are about as likely as whites (20%) and Hispanics (24%) to express a lot of trust.
A large majority of black adults (80%) expect that national news stories will be accurate, more than the share of whites (70%) or Hispanics (71%) who say the same. Overall, 71% of U.S. adults have this expectation.
U.S. Supreme Court justices sit for their official group photo in November 2018. The partisan gap in favorable views of the high court is one of the largest in decades. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
At a time of low public trust in the federal government, a majority of Americans (62%) say they have a favorable view of the Supreme Court. However, Democrats and Republicans are increasingly divided in their assessments of the court.
Today, three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have a favorable opinion of the Supreme Court, compared with only about half (49%) of Democrats and Democratic leaners, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The 26 percentage point difference between the two parties is among the widest it has been over the past two decades.
Republicans’ views of the court have grown much more positive over the past four years. In 2015, following the court’s end-of-term rulings upholding same-sex marriage and most of the Affordable Care Act, GOP views of the Supreme Court reached a 30-year low; just 33% had a favorable opinion. The share of Republicans with a favorable view of the court rose to 82% this past January – equaling its highest point in decades – before slipping to 75% in the most recent survey.
A family tree on the website Ancestry.com. Most U.S. adults who have used a mail-in DNA testing service cite as a reason learning more about where their family came from. (RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
About one-in-seven U.S. adults (15%) say they have ever used a mail-in DNA testing service from a company such as AncestryDNA or 23andMe, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Most of them say they did so to learn more about their family origins, and a notable share say the results surprised them.
When asked about their reasons for using a mail-in DNA testing service, the vast majority of those who have done so (87%) say they wanted to learn more about where their family came from. About a third say they did so to get information about their health or family medical history (36%) and to connect with relatives they might have but didn’t know about (also 36%).
For the most part, people’s DNA test results about their family history line up with their expectations – but a substantial portion of mail-in test users view some of the findings as unforeseen.
Americans believe trust has declined in their country, whether it involves their fellow citizens’ faith in each other or their confidence in the federal government, according to a wide-ranging new Pew Research Center survey. And adults ages 18 to 29 stand out for their comparatively low levels of trust in a number of these areas.
Around three-quarters (73%) of U.S. adults under 30 believe people “just look out for themselves” most of the time. A similar share (71%) say most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance,” and six-in-ten say most people “can’t be trusted.” Across all three of these questions, adults under 30 are significantly more likely than their older counterparts to take a pessimistic view of their fellow Americans.
All told, nearly half of young adults (46%) are what the Center’s report defines as “low trusters” – people who, compared with other Americans, are more likely to see others as selfish, exploitative and untrustworthy, rather than helpful, fair and trustworthy. Older Americans are less likely to be low trusters. For example, just 19% of adults ages 65 and older fall into this category, according to the survey, which was conducted in late 2018 among 10,618 U.S. adults. (You can read more here about how the study grouped Americans into low, medium and high trust categories.)
Transubstantiation – the idea that during Mass, the bread and wine used for Communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ – is central to the Catholic faith. Indeed, the Catholic Church teaches that “the Eucharist is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life.’”
But a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most self-described Catholics don’t believe this core teaching. In fact, nearly seven-in-ten Catholics (69%) say they personally believe that during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine used in Communion “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” Just one-third of U.S. Catholics (31%) say they believe that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.”
Despite ongoing debates over science-related issues, Americans have broadly positive views of scientists and their work, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. But Americans are more tepid when it comes to trusting scientists’ competence, credibility and concern for the public interest – and they are largely skeptical of scientists’ transparency and accountability.
Here are five key findings about public trust in scientists, drawn from the new survey:
1Public confidence in scientists to act in the public interest has increased in recent years. Overall, 35% of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists, up 14 percentage points from 2016. Americans have about the same level of confidence in scientists as they do in the military – and more than they do in some other groups and institutions, including the news media, business leaders and elected officials.
2Half or more of Americans have positive views about each of six professional groups asked about in the survey. The public is warmest toward medical doctors: About three-quarters (74%) say they have a mostly positive view of doctors, 18% are neutral and just 8% have a negative view. Majorities also have positive opinions of medical researchers (68%), dietitians (60%), environmental health specialists (60%) and environmental researchers (57%). About half (51%) have positive overall views of nutrition researchers. Read More →
The teen birth rate in the United States is at a record low, dropping below 18 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19 for the first time since the government began regularly collecting data on this group, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
In 2018, the birth rate among 15- to 19-year-old girls and women was less than half of what it had been in 2008 (41.5 births per 1,000). Asians and Pacific Islanders led the way over this time, followed by Hispanics, with teen birth rate declines of 74% and 65%, respectively. Rates for white and black teens fell by more than 50% over the past decade as well.
About one-in-five U.S. adults say they use Twitter, a share that has remained consistent over the past several years. (Alastair Pike/AFP/Getty Images)
Today, millions of Americans use Twitter to break and comment on news, disseminate official pronouncements, organize campaigns and protests or just let their friends know what’s on their minds.
Here are 10 facts about Americans and Twitter, based on recent Pew Research Center surveys and other studies:
1Around one-in-five U.S. adults (22%) say they use Twitter, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. The share of Americans who use the platform has remained consistent over the past several years and is similar to the share who use Snapchat (24%) and WhatsApp (20%). But a much larger share of U.S. adults use YouTube (73%) and Facebook (69%).
2Twitter users tend to be younger and to have more education and higher incomes than U.S. adults overall, according to a late 2018 survey. While Americans overall are about equally divided between those ages 18 to 49 and those 50 and older, U.S. adults on Twitter are nearly three times as likely to be younger than 50 as to be 50 and older (73% vs. 27%). Overall, 42% of U.S. adult Twitter users have at least a college degree, compared with 31% of all Americans. And 41% of adult Twitter users earn at least $75,000 a year, compared with 32% of all American adults. Read More →
Compared with other Americans, U.S. Jews have relatively high levels of religious knowledge – including about non-Jewish religions like Christianity, Islam and Sikhism. But most non-Jewish Americans are unable to answer some basic factual questions about Jewish practices, including about the Jewish Sabbath and New Year.
This disconnect is apparent in Pew Research Center’s new religious knowledge survey, which asked Americans 32 fact-based multiple-choice questions about religion, each of which had a single correct answer. The survey included questions that gauged knowledge about a range of different religious groups and varied widely in difficulty. (You can test your own knowledge by answering some of these questions in our new quiz.)
On average, U.S. Jews answer about 19 questions right (18.7, to be exact) – considerably more than a variety of other religious groups, including members of several Christian traditions as well as people who say their religion is “nothing in particular.” The only groups comparable to Jews in their levels of religious knowledge are atheists (17.9 questions right, on average), agnostics (17.0) and evangelical Protestants (15.5). While they are more religious than atheists and agnostics, of course, Jewish Americans are on the whole also much less likely than other U.S. adults to consider religion very important in their lives.
An empty newsroom at The Denver Post as layoffs were being announced in March 2018. (Aaron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
Layoffs continue to pummel U.S. newspapers. Roughly a quarter of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.
The layoffs come on top of the roughly one-third of papers in the same circulation range that experienced layoffs in 2017. What’s more, the number of jobs typically cut by newspapers in 2018 tended to be higher than in the year before.
Mid-market newspapers were the most likely to suffer layoffs in 2018 – unlike in 2017, when the largest papers most frequently saw cutbacks. Meanwhile, digital-native news outlets also faced continued layoffs: In 2018, 14% of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets went through layoffs, down slightly from one-in-five in 2017.
The following analysis examines layoffs at large newspapers and digital-native news outlets during the full 2017 and 2018 calendar years. An earlier analysis by the Center looked at layoffs at news organizations covering the period from January 2017 to April 2018.
Black adults stand out for their trust in local news organizations. One-in-three say they have a lot of trust in the information they get from local news organizations, higher than the share of whites who say the same (27%). When it comes to national news organizations, blacks (23%) are about as likely as whites (20%) and Hispanics (24%) to express a lot of trust.
Compared with other Americans, U.S. Jews have relatively high levels of religious knowledge – including about non-Jewish religions like Christianity, Islam and Sikhism. But most non-Jewish Americans are unable to answer some basic factual questions about Jewish practices, including about the Jewish Sabbath and New Year.
