Two-thirds of adults who have listened to a podcast in the past 12 months say they have ever heard news discussed on those podcasts. Put another way, a third of all U.S. adults have been exposed to at least some news through a podcast they listen to.
Many podcast listeners hear news through one or more of three different types of news-related formats. About half or more of podcast listeners listen to a podcast that explains a topic in the news in depth (57%), features a host or hosts offering their opinions about issues in the news (53%), or summarizes the major news stories of the day (51%).
No matter the format, a relatively small percentage of podcast listeners (20%) say they listen to podcasts connected to a news organization, such as a newspaper or a news website. (About the same share, 21%, say they are not sure whether the podcasts they listen to are connected to a news organization.) The majority (59%) say that as far as they know, they don’t listen to any podcasts connected to a news organization, suggesting that much of the news people are exposed to on podcasts could be coming from nontraditional sources.
When listeners hear news on a podcast, they generally offer a very positive assessment of the accuracy of that information. Almost nine-in-ten podcast listeners who hear news discussed on the podcasts they listen to (87%) say they expect that news to be mostly accurate, and most say they trust it about as much as the news they get from other sources (55%) or even more than the news they get from other sources (31%). A considerably smaller share (15%) say they trust the news they get from podcasts less than the news they get from other sources.
A large share of those who get news on podcasts also say they encounter news on that platform that they would not get from other news sources. In all, about three-quarters of listeners who hear news on podcasts say they hear this kind of unique news extremely or fairly often (30%) or sometimes (43%). Only about a quarter (27%) say they rarely or never get news on podcasts that they would not have heard about elsewhere in the media ecosystem.
Just over half of podcast listeners say they hear political opinions on the podcasts they listen to
One style of podcast focuses on hosts’ opinions on current events – in some cases echoing the style of talk radio or cable TV news. Slightly more than half of podcast listeners say they hear hosts or guests presenting their opinions on government and politics.
Among all podcast listeners, 54% say they at least sometimes listen to podcasts that include hosts’ or guests’ political opinions, including a quarter of listeners who say they extremely or fairly often hear this type of content. An additional 23% say they rarely hear this type of commentary. The rest (22%) say they never hear political opinions on the podcasts they listen to.
Many who hear political opinions on podcasts say they largely agree with what they’re hearing. About half of podcast listeners who have heard opinions on government and politics say they line up with their own opinions (47%), compared with only 7% who indicate that those opinions don’t line up with their own. At the same time, 46% say they hear an even mix of opinions from the hosts, some of which match their opinions and some of which do not.
