To better examine the ways Americans get news in a digital age, Pew Research Center surveyed 11,178 U.S. adults from July 26 to Aug. 8, 2021. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
In the past, Pew Research Center has conducted similar research about Americans’ use of social media for news. This survey continues to explore similar topics but in different ways from research done prior to 2020 (see more details here); as a result, some of these measures cannot be directly compared with findings prior to 2020. These changes in question wording reflect the Center’s efforts to improve the way we measure news consumption.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
