☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Trump’s relationship with the media
- In other news: Australia proposes banning social media for children under 16
- Looking ahead: Public media to get extra funding for statehouse reporting
- Chart of the week: A look at news coverage in the first 100 days of Trump’s first term
🔥 Featured story
Donald Trump’s reelection could be a pivotal point for the U.S. media. During the campaign, Trump and his allies kept up their adversarial stance toward journalists, threatening to prosecute those he perceives as enemies and strip TV networks of their broadcast licenses.
Republicans’ views toward news organizations have become much more negative since Trump’s first presidential campaign. Four-in-ten Republicans and GOP-leaning independents now say that they have some or a lot of trust in national news organizations, down from 70% who said this in 2016. Republicans also were much less likely than Democrats to say the news media did a good job covering both the 2020 and 2024 elections.
📌 In other news
- Australia announces plans to ban social media for children under 16
- New York Times tech workers go on strike one day before election
- Trump campaign revokes journalists’ election night press credentials after critical coverage
- A look at Trump’s media strategy after his election victory
- Jeff Bezos congratulates Trump on his election victory after blocking Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris
- Owner of Los Angeles Times cites candidates’ support for Israel as reason for the paper’s non-endorsement in email to senior staff
- A look at Israel’s Channel 14, the ultranationalist TV network that is quickly gaining prominence
📅 Looking ahead
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is providing additional funding to public media in seven states, including Wyoming, Colorado and Nevada, for state government reporting. The support from CPB will help newsrooms hire statehouse journalists, broaden areas of coverage and build collaborations with other outlets.
A 2022 Center study found that the total number of reporters assigned to the 50 state capitols increased by 8% between 2014 and 2022. However, fewer reporters were covering state governments full time. Out of the 1,724 statehouse reporters identified by the 2022 study, just under half (850, or 49%) reported on the statehouse full time.
📊 Chart of the week
After Donald Trump’s reelection, we look back at a chart from a 2017 Pew Research Center study that analyzed news coverage of the first 100 days of Trump’s first term from a variety of major news outlets, including newspaper websites, radio and TV broadcasts, and digital news outlets. During that time, only 11% of stories analyzed delivered an overall positive assessment of the Trump administration’s words or actions, while four times as many (44%) offered a negative assessment. The remaining 45% were neither positive nor negative.
👋 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 Michael Lipka and copy edited by David Kent.
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