☀️ Happy Thursday! This week we look at Univision’s approach to covering Trump, our new research on news consumption, and harassment of Palestinian journalists by Israeli authorities. Sign up here!
The Briefing will be on hiatus until Thursday, Nov. 30. Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃🌽
In today’s email:
- Top story: The warming relationship between Trump and Univision
- New from Pew Research Center: Our latest survey on Americans’ news consumption habits on social media and other platforms, plus new analysis of audience and economic data for newspapers and digital news
- In other news: Palestinian journalists say they have been harassed by Israeli authorities
- Looking ahead: Social media’s largest companies must face child safety lawsuit
- Chart of the week: A rapidly growing share of TikTok users get news on the platform
🔥 Top story
Former President Donald Trump has been critical of Spanish-language news giant Univision in past election cycles, but that appears to be changing after Mexican media company Grupo Televisa merged with Univision in 2021. Trump recently hosted the company’s new executives at Mar-a-Lago and granted Univision an hourlong exclusive interview.
The average number of TVs tuned in to Univision declined in 2022 across all three time slots for national news, according to our latest analysis of Comscore data. There was an 11% decline for the evening news time slot, from an average of about 804,000 TVs in 2021 to roughly 714,000 last year. There was also a 16% decline in the late-night news slot, and a 7% decline in the morning news slot.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
This week, we released two fact sheets examining the shares of Americans who get news from various platforms as well as specific social media sites. We also used this new data to update our analysis of how many Americans get news on TikTok.
- Nearly six-in-ten Americans say they prefer to get news from a digital device (58%), higher than the share who say they prefer TV (27%). Even fewer Americans prefer radio (6%) or print (5%).
- Facebook outpaces other social media sites in the share of Americans who regularly get news there, although YouTube is close behind. Three-in-ten U.S. adults say they regularly get news on Facebook, while 26% say the same about YouTube.
- But the share of Americans who regularly get news on TikTok has surged from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.
We also released two fact sheets last week looking at data on audience and economics for the newspaper industry and digital news.
- In 2022, estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) was 20.9 million for both weekday and Sunday, down 8% and 10% respectively from 2021.
- The average number of unique monthly visitors to the top digital news websites has fallen from 32.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 27.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. The length of the average visit to these sites also is getting shorter.
Explore all the fact sheets from our State of the News Media project.
📌 In other news
- Public broadcasters in Rhode Island to merge pending state and FCC approval
- Trump files legal motion supporting media requests for live TV coverage of his federal trial
- Palestinian journalists say they have been harassed and intimidated by Israeli authorities
- Former Fox News reporter says the network fired him for his opposition to their Jan. 6 coverage
- Meta begins to allow political ads on Facebook and Instagram that question the legitimacy of the 2020 election on Facebook and Instagram
- South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol clamps down on what he calls “fake news,” raising alarm among liberal opposition and journalists
📅 Looking ahead
Several social media giants will face a lawsuit alleging that their platforms are addictive and have adverse mental health effects on children, after a federal judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case.
A pair of 2023 Pew Research Center surveys look at U.S. adults’ and teens’ views of social media policies aimed at minors. Adults are much more likely than teens to favor parental consent for minors to use social media (81% vs. 46%), and to support social media companies setting limits on how much time minors can spend on their sites (69% vs. 34%).
📊 Chart of the week
Our chart of the week comes from our updated analysis of how many Americans get news from TikTok. Users of TikTok are now just as likely to get news from TikTok as Facebook users are to get news from Facebook: 43% of each site’s users say they regularly get news there. Among 11 sites included in the survey, only X (formerly known as Twitter) has a higher share of users who regularly get news from the site (53%).
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Sarah Naseer, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Katerina Eva Matsa, Michael Lipka and Mark Jurkowitz, and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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