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In today’s email:
- Featured story: Trump’s continued tensions with news organizations
- In other news: Supreme Court agrees to hear challenge raised against TikTok ban
- Looking ahead: Legacy media turns to TikTok to expand audience reach
- Chart of the week: About one-in-five Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media
🔥 Featured story
In a press conference this week, President-elect Donald Trump suggested that he would continue to file lawsuits against news organizations after ABC News settled a defamation suit by agreeing to pay $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. Trump sued CBS News in October over a 60 Minutes interview with his general election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and he sued The Des Moines Register this week over a pre-election poll that showed him trailing Harris in Iowa. (He ultimately won the state by 13 percentage points.)
Trump’s tensions with the news media are not new. According to a survey we conducted in March 2017, early in his first term as president, 83% of U.S. adults said the relationship between Trump and the media was generally unhealthy, and 73% said these tensions were getting in the way of Americans’ access to important political news. Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats expressed these views.
📌 In other news
- Supreme Court will hear challenge to TikTok ban on Jan. 10 before law takes effect
- Spain announces bill requiring digital platforms to publicly correct false information
- Russian official describes editors of Britain’s Times newspaper as “legitimate military targets”
- Los Angeles Times owner reportedly blocks criticism of Trump in opinion section
- Candidates withdraw from Washington Post’s executive editor search
- Ozy Media co-founder Carlos Watson sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for attempt to defraud investors
- Forbes stops hiring freelancers for product reviews, citing Google’s parasite SEO policy
- CNN faces criticism after claimed civilian prisoner rescued on camera is revealed as an intelligence officer for the Assad government
📅 Looking ahead
Legacy media brands are turning to TikTok to reach younger audiences, according to new reporting from The Wall Street Journal. About four-in-ten U.S. adults under 30 (39%) say they regularly get news on TikTok, according to a 2024 Center survey, much higher than the share of older Americans.
According to a recent Center study, fewer than 1% of accounts followed by U.S. adult TikTok users are those of journalists or media outlets. And another study found that most news influencers on TikTok (84%) – individuals with a large number of followers who regularly post about news or current events – have no affiliation with a news organization.
📊 Chart of the week
Our chart this week – one of the Center’s most striking findings of 2024 – comes from our recent study on news influencers.
About one-in-five U.S. adults (21%) say they regularly get news from news influencers, defined as individuals who have a large following on social media and often post about news or political or social issues.
This is especially common among younger adults: 37% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly get news from influencers, compared with just 7% of those 65 and older.
👋 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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