How we did this
Pew Research Center conducted this study to continue tracking news consumption and trust across a wide range of specific news sources. We last published similar reports in 2020 (based on a 2019 survey) and 2014.
We regularly ask people about their news habits on various platforms (e.g., television, print, radio and digital) and their levels of trust in information from social media and national/local news organizations in general. But this study is designed to be more specific, looking at Americans’ familiarity with, usage of and views toward 30 individual news sources. To learn more about how we chose the 30 news sources, please visit the methodology.
Respondents first received a list of all 30 news sources and were asked to select all the sources that they had heard of. Next, for all the sources a respondent had heard of, they were asked which ones they generally trust as sources of news. Then, for all sources that they had heard of but did not say they trust, they were asked if they generally distrust those sources as sources of news.
Finally, the survey asked respondents which sources they regularly get news from (again, only among the sources they already indicated they had heard of before).
This survey design is similar to one used in a 2019 survey but not directly comparable. The 2025 survey asked Americans which sources they regularly get news from; in 2019, we asked people which sources they got political and election news from within the past week. We also changed several of the 30 sources to reflect the current news media landscape.
We surveyed 9,482 U.S. adults from March 10 to 16, 2025. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. This kind of recruitment gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection. Interviews were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other factors. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.
For years now, Democrats have been much more likely than Republicans to say they trust the information that comes from national news organizations.
A new Pew Research Center survey gets much more specific: How do Americans feel about 30 of the country’s major news sources?
Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to both use and trust a number of major news sources. These include the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), the cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, major public broadcasters PBS and NPR, and the legacy newspaper with the largest number of digital subscribers, The New York Times.
Republicans, meanwhile, are much more likely to distrust than trust all of these sources. A smaller number of the sources we asked about are more heavily used and trusted by Republicans than Democrats, including Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network and Breitbart.
These findings are broadly similar to the last time we asked Americans about many specific news sources, in 2019. The two surveys are not directly comparable due to changes in the way we asked the questions.
How we chose these 30 news sources
We selected 30 news sources based on a variety of measures, including audience size and previous survey results. We also wanted to prioritize a range of news sources across different platforms, as well as both legacy news outlets and nontraditional news sources, all while keeping the list from becoming too long for survey respondents. This selection process is not perfect; we acknowledge that no list of 30 sources could represent the entirety of today’s diverse and changing media environment. We believe this group of 30 provides an appropriate snapshot of media brands to help us study Americans’ changing news habits. To learn more, read the FAQ and methodology.
Americans’ use of news sources by party
In many cases, supporters of the two main U.S. political parties are relying largely on different sources of news and information.
Republicans and independents who lean Republican get news from a fairly concentrated group of sources, and one rises to the top: Fox News. A majority of Republicans (57%) say they regularly get news from the cable network, at least double the share who say they turn to any other news source we asked about.
Behind Fox, Republicans are most likely to say they regularly get news from the three major broadcast networks – ABC News (27%), NBC News (24%) and CBS News (22%) – and The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (22%).
While not among Republicans’ most-consumed news sources, several sources are more likely to be regular sources of news for Republicans than Democrats, including Newsmax (15% vs. 1%), The Daily Wire (12% vs. 2%) and Tucker Carlson Network (9% vs. 1%).
Democrats and Democratic leaners, on the other hand, turn to a wider range of the sources we asked about. Nearly half of Democrats say they regularly get news from CNN (48%), NBC (47%) and ABC (46%). About four-in-ten Democrats say they get news from CBS (39%), while roughly three-in-ten say the same about MSNBC (33%), NPR (32%), The Associated Press (31%), PBS (31%), BBC News (30%) and The New York Times (29%).
All of these sources are far more likely to be consumed by Democrats than Republicans. To a lesser extent, Democrats also are more likely than Republicans to say they get news from The Washington Post (18% vs. 7%), Politico (12% vs. 4%) and The Atlantic (10% vs. 1%).
Even as news sources differ by party, there is still some overlap. For instance, 20% of Republicans and GOP leaners regularly consume news from CNN, similar to the share of Democrats who get news from Fox News (18%). And comparable portions of both groups get news from several less-used sources, such as The Wall Street Journal (16% among Democrats vs. 12% among Republicans), Forbes (10% vs. 9%) and the New York Post (8% vs. 10%).
The political makeup of each news source’s regular news consumers
Some of the sources we asked about have audiences that are much more right-leaning than the average U.S. adult, while many sources’ audiences lean left.
This study only looks at each news source’s audience and does not categorize the content of each news source by its political lean.
Each source’s placement on this chart is based on the average measure of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from that source – taking into consideration both the party identification (Republican or Democrat, including leaners) and ideology (conservative, moderate or liberal) of respondents. Refer to the methodology for details.
For instance, the average audience member of Forbes sits closest to the party and ideology of the average U.S. adult. The average person who regularly gets news from The Wall Street Journal sits just to the left of the average American, while the typical adult who gets news from the New York Post is just right of the typical U.S. adult.
The fact that Democrats regularly get news from a wider range of the sources we asked about than Republicans is echoed in those sources’ average audience placements: Audiences for a majority of the outlets we asked about fall at least slightly to the left of the average U.S. adult. People who regularly get news from The Atlantic, HuffPost, NPR, The Guardian and Axios, among others, are particularly liberal and Democratic.
On the right, the average audience members of Breitbart, Newsmax and Tucker Carlson Network tend to be the most conservative and Republican of all the sources we asked about, followed by people who regularly get news from The Daily Wire and The Joe Rogan Experience. Fox News is also on the right side of the spectrum in terms of audience orientation, but not as far to the right as these other sources – indicating that more Democrats and moderate or liberal Republicans get news from Fox News.
Trust and distrust in news sources among Republicans and Democrats
How we asked about trust
We first asked respondents whether they have heard of 30 different news sources. For all sources that a given respondent said they had heard of, they were asked if they trust it as a source of news. If they had heard of a source but did not say they trust it, they were then asked if they distrust it as a source of news. Respondents also could decline to say that they trust it or distrust it.
Some sources, such as The Hill, are not widely familiar to Americans (37% of U.S. adults said they had heard of The Hill, including roughly equal shares of Democrats and Republicans). So, while 11% of Democrats say they trust The Hill as a source of news, just 5% say they distrust it; most Democrats didn’t offer an opinion or haven’t heard of The Hill. For percentages who have heard of each source, refer to the News Media Tracker data tool.
Republicans and Democrats sharply differ from each other in which news sources they trust or distrust.
Only a few sources among the 30 we asked about are trusted by more than a quarter of Republicans and Republican leaners. A majority (56%) trust Fox News as a source of news, while 31% say they trust The Joe Rogan Experience. And while roughly a quarter trust each of the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), larger shares of Republicans say they distrust the networks.
On the other hand, Democrats and Democratic leaners trust a much longer list of sources. CNN, the three broadcast TV networks, PBS, the BBC, The Associated Press, NPR, The New York Times and MSNBC are all trusted by more than four-in-ten Democrats. And Democrats are much less likely than Republicans to say they actively distrust most of the outlets asked about.
In some cases, Democrats and Republicans almost mirror each other in how they view certain news organizations. For example, 58% of Democrats trust CNN and 14% say they distrust it. On the other side, 58% of Republicans distrust CNN, while 21% say they trust it. A similar pattern occurs in reverse for Fox News: 56% of Republicans trust Fox News as a source of news, while 64% of Democrats say they distrust it.
But because some outlets are smaller or less well-known, the percentage of people in each party who trust each outlet can be hard to compare. For example, fewer Republicans say they trust Tucker Carlson Network (14%) than CNN (21%), but Republicans also are much less likely to distrust Tucker Carlson Network (6%) than CNN (58%).
In other words, among Republicans, Tucker Carlson Network is more trusted than distrusted, while CNN is more distrusted than trusted – even though a larger share of Republicans trust CNN than Tucker Carlson Network. This is because there are fewer Republicans overall who have heard of Tucker Carlson Network or who offered an opinion about it.
The chart below shows a ratio of trust to distrust, which takes into account the balance of viewpoints offered for those outlets that are less well-known. Circles to the right of the line represent outlets that are more trusted than distrusted among members of each party, and circles to the left of the line represent outlets that are more distrusted than trusted. Smaller circles represent those outlets that are less well-known overall.
Even taking into consideration the fact that some outlets are less well-known than others, Republicans distrust more than trust most of the outlets in this study. Meanwhile, Democrats are more likely to trust than distrust most of the outlets we asked about.
There are, however, a few outlets with right-leaning audiences that Democrats largely distrust. The outlet with the highest distrust-to-trust ratio is Breitbart: Just 1% of Democrats trust Breitbart, while 26% distrust it. (Breitbart is not shown in the chart because its ratio puts it far outside the chart’s scale.)
For more details, including the specific outlets shown in this chart, refer to the News Media Tracker data tool.
