☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: The tension between political coverage on MSNBC and NBC News
- New from Pew Research Center: Do Americans think it’s important that the journalists they get news from share their personal traits?
- In other news: Biden and Trump agree to presidential debates
- Looking ahead: The Athletic in talks to unionize
- Chart of the week: Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats more likely to prefer journalists who share their politics
🔥 Featured story
A New York Times article published this week looks at the tension between cable and network news brands under the NBC umbrella. While MSNBC has embraced left-leaning content, NBC News is still striving to reach Americans across the political spectrum.
We looked at Americans’ levels of trust in many specific news outlets during the last presidential election cycle, finding in a 2019 survey that Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to say they trust both NBC News and MSNBC for political and election news. A majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (61%) said they trust NBC News, compared with 30% of Republicans and GOP leaners. For MSNBC, 48% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans trusted the network for political news.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans how important it is to see their personal characteristics reflected in the journalists and reporters they get news from.
Key findings include:
- Most Americans say it is not important that the news they get comes from journalists who share their political views, age, gender or other traits. But more people say it is important for journalists to share their politics than any other personal trait.
- Younger Americans are more likely to want news from journalists who are similar to them in age.
- Americans who identify with a religion are more likely than those who are religiously unaffiliated to find it at least somewhat important to get news from journalists who share their religious views (26% vs. 15%).
Read more about this analysis.
📌 In other news
- Biden and Trump agree to presidential debates on CNN and ABC News
- Group of conservative consultants to launch new Capitol Hill news outlet
- Longtime CNN executive Sam Feist to become CEO of C-SPAN
- Concerns among web publishers as Google announces it will launch AI-generated answers in search results
- Croatian journalists face threats from far-right party’s supporters
- Writers and publishers in Singapore reject government plan to train AI model with their work
- Whereabouts unknown of Chinese citizen journalist who reported on COVID-19
📅 Looking ahead
Staffers at The Athletic are in talks to unionize as the site further integrates with The New York Times. Last year, The Times cut its sports desk and announced plans to rely on The Athletic for sports coverage after purchasing the subscription-based publication in 2022.
About one-in-six U.S. journalists at news organizations (16%) reported being in a union in a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, and another 41% said they would join one if it were available to them.
Overall, 26% of U.S. journalists employed by a news organization full time or part time said their organization has a union, with those at larger organizations far more likely to say there is a union available to them.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart of the week comes from a new Center analysis about how important Americans say it is for journalists to share their personal characteristics. Republicans and Democrats are about equally likely to say it is at least somewhat important for the news they get to come from journalists who have the same political views as them. However, people who place themselves at either end of the ideological spectrum are more likely than those toward the center to say journalists’ politics are important.
👋 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.
Do you like this newsletter? Email us at journalism@pewresearch.org or fill out this two-question survey to tell us what you think.
