☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: Independent journalist breaks federal funding freeze story
- New from Pew Research Center: How news influencers talked about Trump and Harris during the 2024 election
- In other news: A look at how some local news outlets are trying to fight against misinformation about ICE raids
- Looking ahead: Pentagon to remove NBC News, The New York Times, NPR and Politico from office space under new rotation
- Chart of the week: News influencers with a newsroom background were more critical of Trump; those outside the industry were more critical of Harris
🔥 Featured story
The Trump administration last week issued an executive order to freeze spending on all federal loans and grants, which has since been rescinded after major backlash. News of the spending freeze was initially reported by Marisa Kabas, an independent journalist posting on Bluesky and her own website.
Many independent journalists are now sharing news on social media. Our recent study of news influencers found that the vast majority of people with large followings who regularly post about news and current events on social media are not affiliated with a news organization. This comes amid declining trust in national news organizations and as most U.S. adults say these outlets are influenced at least somewhat by corporate or political interests.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
A new Center analysis looks at more than 150,000 posts from news influencers published in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, as well as in its aftermath. Most news influencers were talking about both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in this time period, and identical shares were more critical than supportive of each candidate. But there were more posts about Trump than Harris, and those posts tended to be less critical of him than posts about Harris were of her.
Learn more about news influencers’ posts about the candidates.
📌 In other news
- A look at how some local news outlets are trying to fight misinformation about ICE raids
- Lara Trump to host a show on Fox News
- Smaller news outlets focused on the federal workforce see traffic increases as Trump and Musk seek to reshape the federal government
- FCC releases transcript of 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris due to Trump’s lawsuit against CBS
- White House to cancel $8 million in Politico subscriptions as conspiracy theories spread
- Los Angeles Times offers voluntary buyouts to employees who have been at the outlet for two years or longer
- Reuters and CNN are expanding in the Middle East
📅 Looking ahead
The Trump administration recently announced plans to remove four media organizations from their office spaces in the Pentagon as part of a “new annual media rotation.” The plan asked NBC News, The New York Times, NPR and Politico to vacate their spaces by Feb. 14. They will be replaced by the New York Post, One America News, Breitbart News and HuffPost.
Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use the media sources slated for removal. According to a fall 2024 Center survey, 53% of Democrats say they use The New York Times as a major or minor source of political and election news, compared with 24% of Republicans. A similar partisan gap exists for those who use NPR and the major TV networks (ABC, CBS or NBC), as well as the cable network MSNBC. The 2024 survey did not ask about Politico, but a 2019 survey found that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to both use and trust the outlet.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart is a look into our new analysis of the social media posts made by news influencers in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
News influencers with a background in the news industry were more likely to take a side (critical or supportive) when discussing Trump than when discussing Harris. And when they did, they were more likely to be generally critical than supportive of Trump (51% vs. 20%). Influencers without a news industry background were also more likely to be critical than supportive of Trump, but only slightly (39% vs. 31%).
![Bar graph showing the percent of news influencers that mentioned each presidential candidate in their posts that were mostly [critical, supportive, or neutral] of the candidate in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. election. The graph shows that news influencers with newsroom experience were more critical of Trump, while those outside the industry were more critical of Harris.](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/02/SR_2024.2.6_news-influencers_0-4.webp?w=640)
👋 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 Anna Jackson.
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