Name: The most civically engaged Americans tend to be overrepresented in the audiences of most news sources
Creator: Pew Research Center
Published: 2026-11-13
License: https://www.pewresearch.org/terms-and-conditions/

Pew Knight Initiative

The Pew-Knight Initiative supports new research on how Americans absorb civic information, form beliefs and identities, and engage in their communities.

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U.S. news sources like CNN, Fox News and The New York Times tend to attract audiences that differ from one another by partisanship and education level. These distinct audiences also engage in public life in varying ways, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative.

When we categorize Americans based on patterns in their political activity, civic involvement, religious attendance and attention to news, those who are most engaged across all these areas also tend to be overrepresented in the audiences for certain online and print news sources – particularly outlets that focus on politics. Meanwhile, TV news audiences tend to look more similar to Americans overall in how they engage in public life.

These findings come from Center data on the audiences of 30 prominent news sources, combined with data from our recent study examining how Americans participate in society across a range of behaviors. This type of analysis allows us to see how certain news audiences fit into our four “engagement groups”: Mobilizers, Connectors, Spectators and Outsiders.

Overall, Americans in the most engaged groups tend be overrepresented in the audiences of most news sources. This makes sense since news consumption is among the factors we used to build these categories.

About this research

This analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative looks at the relationship between how Americans engage in public life and where they regularly get news.

Why we did this

Recently, Pew Research Center explored in various ways, including voting and volunteering, following the news, and taking part in religious or community activities. We did this analysis to better understand how these behaviors relate to one another.

The Center also regularly asks Americans about their news habits on various platforms (e.g., television, print, radio and digital) and about their familiarity with, usage of and trust in individual news sources.

Learn more about Pew Research Center and our research on news habits and media.

How we did this

This analysis draws mainly on two Center surveys. Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). The surveys represent the views of the full U.S. adult population.

To understand which news sources Americans regularly use, we surveyed 9,482 U.S. adults from March 10 to 16, 2025. We gave respondents a list of 30 news sources and asked them to select all the sources that they had heard of. Then we asked them which of those sources they regularly get news from.

Here are the questions used for the news sources analysis, the detailed responses and the survey methodology, which also describes how we chose the 30 news sources.

To classify respondents into engagement groups, we surveyed 5,195 adults from Sept. 8 to 14, 2025, including 4,476 people who had taken the March survey. We classified them based on their responses to 19 measures of participation across politics, civic and community involvement, news consumption, and religious life. This classification process used a non-ATP Center survey of 5,393 adults fielded from July 9 to Dec. 5, 2025; its results are also used as a reference for the share of U.S. adults in each engagement group.

Refer to “How we measured Americans’ engagement in public life” for more details. Here are the questions used for the engagement analysis, the detailed responses and the survey methodology.

This is a Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative, a research program funded jointly by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Find related publications online at https://www.pewresearch.org/pew-knight/.

About the engagement groups

A previous Pew Research Center report sorted Americans into four groups based on their answers to 19 questions about how they engage (or don’t engage) in society through political activity, civic involvement, religious service attendance and attention to news. The four groups are:

Mobilizers: Doing it all. This group is the smallest and the most active across politics, civics, news and religion.

Connectors: Involved, but less political. This group is larger than the Mobilizers and also highly engaged in many ways – including joining groups and making donations – but much less likely than the Mobilizers to be heavily involved in political activities.

Spectators: Keeping an eye on things. They follow the news at high rates but are much less likely than the more engaged groups to participate directly in other ways.

Outsiders: Less involved in most ways. This group is less likely than others to report taking part in most of the activities we asked about – including voting, volunteering and following the news.

Mobilizers are overrepresented in many political news audiences

News outlets that heavily cover politics are among the sources whose audiences contain a disproportionately high share of Mobilizers – the most politically active engagement group.

A relatively small share of Americans overall (9%) are Mobilizers. By comparison, 19% of U.S. adults who regularly get news from Axios are classified as Mobilizers. That’s twice the share in the overall population.

Likewise, audiences of The Atlantic (18%), The Hill (16%) and Politico (16%) are classified as Mobilizers at higher rates than Americans overall. The same is true for the audiences of two public media organizations: NPR (16%) and PBS (15%).

Outsiders participate in public life in the fewest ways, and they also tend to be underrepresented in many news sources’ audiences. But a number of television outlets are exceptions to that pattern.

About three-in-ten Americans (31%) are classified as Outsiders. The audiences for the country’s three major broadcast news networks (ABC News, CBS News and NBC News) and two most popular cable news channels (Fox News and CNN) comprise roughly the same share of Outsiders.

When it comes to Spanish-language TV stations Telemundo and Univision, 38% of their audiences are Outsiders – slightly higher than the share among U.S. adults overall. On the other hand, 22% of the audiences for BBC News, Newsmax and PBS are Outsiders.

The audiences of most news sources we asked about reflect a higher share of Connectors – a group that is heavily engaged in most areas of public life, except politics – than can be found in the U.S. population overall. Many of the sources that attract a relatively large share of Mobilizers also reach a large number of Connectors.

While 28% of Americans overall are Connectors, just under half of U.S. adults who regularly get news from The Atlantic (47%) and The Hill (45%) are classified this way. Connectors also make up larger shares of the Breitbart, HuffPost and Politico audiences (44% each) than the general public.

Despite following news at similarly high rates as Connectors, Spectators are underrepresented in the audiences of many news sources.

There are some exceptions to this pattern, however. For example, 37% of Americans who regularly get news from The Joe Rogan Experience are categorized as Spectators, compared with 31% of U.S. adults overall.

In addition, Spectators comprise 36% of U.S. adults who regularly get news from Telemundo and 40% of those who regularly get news from Univision. This reflects the fact that Hispanic Americans are significantly more likely than non-Hispanic White or Black Americans to be categorized as Spectators (44% vs. 26% and 35%, respectively).

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