More Americans get news about government and politics than about other topics

More Americans say they get news about government and politics than four other topics asked about in a March 2025 Pew Research Center survey.

Older Americans and those who voted in the 2024 presidential election are especially likely to get government and political news. Younger adults, for their part, are more likely than older people to get news about entertainment.

A majority of Americans (62%) say they get news about government and politics extremely often or often. Smaller shares say they frequently get news about:

• Science and technology (32%)
• Business and finance (32%)
• Sports (27%)
• Entertainment (19%)

How we did this

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis as part of our work on Americans’ news habits. For this analysis, we surveyed 9,482 U.S. adults from March 10 to 16, 2025.

Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. This kind of recruitment gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection. Interviews were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other factors. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

This analysis also examines Americans’ news habits through the lens of validated voters. Validated voters are adult citizens who said they voted in the 2024 presidential election on a postelection survey and have a record showing they voted in their state’s official voter turnout records.

Those who said they did not vote – or were not found to have voted in official state voting records – are considered nonvoters. Those who could not be matched are also considered nonvoters.

The postelection survey of U.S. adults was conducted from Nov. 12 to 17, 2024, on the American Trends Panel (ATP). For more information about how we define and study validated voters, read the reports’ methodology.

Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.

Which Americans are more likely to get certain types of news?

Older adults are more likely to say they get news on most of the topics we asked about extremely often or often. However, younger adults are more likely than older people to frequently get entertainment news.

This age difference is most prominent when it comes to news about government and politics. Among Americans ages 65 and older, 77% get this kind of news extremely often or often, compared with half of those ages 18 to 29.

Meanwhile, about a third of adults under 30 get entertainment news extremely often or often, compared with 19% or fewer in older age groups.

Similar shares of Republicans and Democrats say they get news on several topics. Identical or nearly identical shares in each party (including independents who lean toward those parties) get news about government and politics, business and finance, and sports extremely often or often.

However, Democrats are slightly more likely than Republicans to say they frequently get news about science and technology and about entertainment.

Americans who were validated as having voted in the 2024 presidential election are also more likely than those who were eligible but did not vote to get news on three topics we asked about:

• Government and politics (70% vs. 45%)
• Business and finance (36% vs. 23%)
• Science and technology (34% vs. 27%)

However, these two groups are equally likely to get news about sports (27% each). And nonvoters are more likely than voters to get news about entertainment (17% vs. 25%).