☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Nevada probate commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust
- In other news: Judge blocks Infowars acquisition by The Onion
- Looking ahead: Republican senator introduces bill to cut funding for public media
- Chart of the week: Do Americans think news coverage is fair to all sides?
🔥 Featured story
A Nevada probate commissioner has rejected Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change his family’s trust in order to give his oldest child, Lachlan, control of News Corp when he dies. Rupert Murdoch has previously argued that Lachlan would keep Fox News’ conservative orientation and solidify his companies’ commercial values for all of his children.
More Americans name Fox News as their main source for political news than any other source, according to an open-ended question in a recent Pew Research Center survey. The same survey found that 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say Fox News is a major or minor source of political and election news for them, compared with just 32% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
Meanwhile, a Center survey from 2019 found that 75% of U.S. adults who identified as conservative at the time trusted the outlet for political and election news, while 77% of liberals distrusted Fox News for this kind of news.
📌 In other news
- Judge rejects acquisition of Infowars by The Onion
- After Assad’s fall in Syria, hopes rise of finding long-missing American reporter Austin Tice
- Trump picks Kari Lake to lead Voice of America
- Matt Gaetz to join OAN with primetime show
- Justice Department report shows prosecutors violated rules when seizing journalists’ phone records during the Trump administration
- Senate GOP blocks bill to bolster protections for journalists following Trump’s opposition
- Israel’s cabinet to boycott newspaper Haaretz after publisher’s controversial remarks
- Australia plans new tax to force social media companies to pay news publishers after Meta walked away from previous deal
📅 Looking ahead
Republican Sen. John Kennedy introduced a bill last week to end federal funding for U.S. public media, continuing a long-standing Republican effort to defund NPR, PBS and their member stations. But the chances of success may be higher after Donald Trump returns to the White House: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the proposed leaders of a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” also have suggested that public media be cut from the federal budget.
According to a recent Center survey about political news sources, about a third of Americans (34%) use NPR as a source of political and election news, although Democrats are more than twice as likely as Republicans to say this (48% vs. 21%). And in 2019, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to trust both NPR and PBS for political and election news.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from our recent analysis conducted two months before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
About three-quarters of U.S. adults (77%) say news organizations tend to favor one side when presenting the news on political and social issues. Far fewer (22%) believe news organizations deal fairly with all sides.
In surveys going back almost 40 years, most Americans have viewed news coverage as favoring one side. But the share of Americans who say so is near the highest it’s been since we first asked this question in 1985.
👋 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.
Do you like this newsletter? Email us at journalism@pewresearch.org or fill out this two-question survey to tell us what you think.
