☀️ Happy Thursday!
In today’s email:
- Top story: Google Podcasts to shut down
- New from Pew Research Center: Black Americans’ experiences with news
- In other news: Social media companies hesitate to moderate Indian content that violates terms of service
- Looking ahead: X disables feature for reporting political misinformation ahead of major elections
- Chart of the week: Black Americans express a range of concerns about how Black people are covered in the news
🔥 Top story
Google announced on Tuesday that it will shut down its Google Podcasts app in 2024 and begin offering podcasts within YouTube Music instead. In a statement, YouTube said it will be “increasing investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music” with focus on “community, discovery and switching between audio and visual.”
Roughly half of U.S. adults say they have listened to a podcast in the past year, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, including one-in-five who report listening to podcasts at least a few times a week. Two-thirds of podcast listeners say they have heard news discussed on the podcasts they listen to.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
A new Pew Research Center survey focuses on Black Americans’ experiences with the news.
Key findings include:
- Black Americans see several problems in news coverage of Black people. Most say that Black people are covered more negatively than people in other racial and ethnic groups.
- Black Democrats and Republicans, as well as Black adults across all age groups, are similarly critical of news coverage of Black people.
- Educating journalists about issues impacting Black people and their history is among the steps Black Americans say would help the situation.
- Many Black Americans say Black journalists are better at understanding them and covering issues related to race, though few see a reporter’s race as a key factor in determining the accuracy of news in general.
Media coverage:
Andscape: New report finds Black Americans remain deeply skeptical of news media
USA Today: Black people’s distrust of media not likely to change any time soon, survey found
Poynter: 63% of Black Americans say news about Black people is more negative, study finds
The Black Wall Street Times: Pew Research finds most Black folks are critical of news depictions
🕵️ In other news
- Social media companies hesitate to moderate Indian content that violates terms of services
- A look at research exploring how readers define “news”
- A new nonprofit newsroom in Houston centers community in its reporting
- The effect of Meta’s news blackout on student journalists and small publishers in Canada
- A news site in Massachusetts is using AI to fill the gap in local reporting
- How a podcast is giving Amsterdam’s undocumented citizens a voice
📅 Looking ahead
This week we look ahead to concerns about election misinformation on social media platforms as the United States heads into a presidential election year. X, formerly Twitter, has disabled a feature that allowed users to report misinformation about elections, according to an Australian research group.
About two-thirds of Americans (65%) say technology companies should take steps to restrict false information online even if it limits freedom of information, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year. This share has increased from 56% in 2018.
📊 Chart of the week
In our new report on Black Americans’ experiences with news, Black Americans are far more likely to view news coverage of Black people negatively than positively in several areas. For example, 57% of Black Americans say that the news they see or hear about Black people only covers certain segments of Black communities – 9% say it covers a wide variety of Black people, and 31% say both of these things happen about equally.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Sarah Naseer, Christopher St. Aubin and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Katerina Eva Matsa, Michael Lipka and Mark Jurkowitz, and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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