News Audience Trends and Attitudes

The public is more likely to have heard “a lot” about ongoing confrontations between police and protesters than several other stories.

Traffic to digital-native news sites has plateaued in recent years. After rising from 2014 to 2016, it remained steady through 2019.

Those ages 18 to 29 differ from older Americans in their news consumption habits and in their responses to major news events and coverage.

Some 61% of U.S. adults say they follow COVID-19 news at both the national and local level equally, and 23% say they pay more attention to local news.

59% of Americans think news organizations do not understand people like them, while a minority – 37% – say they do feel understood.

Black adults were much more likely than whites and somewhat more likely than Hispanic adults to frequently discuss the pandemic with others.

Americans’ confidence in checking COVID-19 information aligns closely with their confidence in checking the accuracy of news stories broadly.

31% of U.S. adults say they discuss the outbreak with other people most of the time; another 13% say they talk about it almost all of the time.

More Americans hold positive than negative views of the news media’s COVID-19 coverage, but Republicans and Democrats remain starkly divided.

The public’s sense about the pandemic's impact on the financial well-being of most news organizations is far from clear.