With the 2024 presidential election a year away, new research shows that Americans are watching or reading the news less closely than they were just a few years earlier. According to a new Pew Research Center analysis, since 2016, there has been a precipitous decline in adults following the news.
In 2016, 51% of adults said they followed the news “all or most of the time.” The latest numbers from 2022 show that number has dropped to 38%.
The decline in viewership comes as the public faces high levels of news fatigue and questions whether the media is accurately and fairly reporting the news. This distrust has been driven by political division in recent years.
According to a September poll by Gallup, American’s confidence that the news media will accurately report the news is at its lowest level since 2016. That’s when Republican trust in the media plummeted after former president Donald Trump began calling the press fake news and the “enemy of the people.”
Historically, Democrats have had more trust in the media than Republicans, but the Gallup study shows their confidence in the news is also down, having fallen 12 points in the last year to 58%.
It is worth nothing that those numbers are still much higher than those for Republicans and independents:
- 58% Democrats.
- 11% Republicans.
- 29% Independents.
In a 2019 discussion about building trust with news consumers, the director of Journalism Research at Pew, Amy Mitchell, said the sheer amount of information online has made it difficult for Americans to identify credible news sources.
“The majority of Americans … have said to us in our survey work that they are overwhelmed by the amount of news and information that’s out there today,” Mitchell said. “We looked at people’s ability to differentiate between factual statements in the news and opinions. And we were interested to see what characteristics have some impact or don’t have some impact on that. And what we saw was pretty striking, which was that those who had high digital savviness compared with low digital savviness did far better in their ability to distinguish between those two.”
There are also calls for social media platforms to stop the spread of misinformation. The Israel-Hamas war is the latest example. During the week of Oct. 15, the European Union sent a letter to X owner Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding they stop the spread of misinformation on their platforms or face penalties.
