Americans’ confidence in checking COVID-19 information aligns closely with their confidence in checking the accuracy of news stories broadly.
With Election Day six months away, 52% of Americans are paying fairly close or very close attention to news about the presidential candidates.
People in this group are most likely to say the outbreak has been made too big of a deal and journalists have been exaggerating the risks.
More Americans hold positive than negative views of the news media’s COVID-19 coverage, but Republicans and Democrats remain starkly divided.
The percentage who say journalists have exaggerated the risks of the outbreak has decreased notably in recent weeks.
The public’s sense about the pandemic's impact on the financial well-being of most news organizations is far from clear.
61% give equal attention to national and local coronavirus news.
More than two-thirds of adults ages 65 or older said they were following news of the pandemic very closely.
A new analysis of open-ended responses to a survey of U.S. adults looks at the specific storylines or claims about COVID-19 that Americans said they were exposed to.
Many U.S. news organizations are covering the coronavirus pandemic while themselves facing financial pressure from the outbreak.
