Americans have a wide variety of news sources available to them this election season.
In September, we asked U.S. adults to name the source they turn to most often for political and election news. People mentioned hundreds of unique sources across more than 8,000 open-ended responses, demonstrating the fragmented nature of the modern news environment.
Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand where Americans turn most often for their political news ahead of the 2024 presidential election. We surveyed 9,680 adults from Sept. 16 to 22, 2024.
Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. This kind of recruitment gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection. Surveys were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other factors. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.
In the survey, we asked respondents in an open-ended question to volunteer their main source for political news. This allowed respondents to name any source, not limiting them to the ones we asked about in other questions. If respondents volunteered more than one source, we accepted the first one mentioned.
We grouped these open-ended responses by brand. For instance, “NY Times,” “NYT” and “nytimes.com” were all counted as indicating The New York Times was the respondent’s main source. Additionally, specific local television channels were grouped into the “local TV” category.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The most common single outlet that Americans name as their main source for political news is Fox News (13%). Older adults are much more likely than younger adults to name Fox News: 22% of those ages 65 and older say this is their main source for this news, compared with just 5% of adults under 30.
One-in-ten Americans cite CNN as their top source of political news. This represents a slight decline since the last time we asked this question in 2021, when 14% of respondents said CNN was their main political news source.
Beyond Fox News and CNN, at least 2% of Americans name eight other sources:
- A specific local TV station or local TV in general
- Other national TV news channels (ABC News, NBC News, MSNBC or CBS News)
- NPR, the only radio organization among these top sources
- The New York Times, the only traditional newspaper on the list
- X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. A previous Pew Research Center study found that X is more of a destination for news than other social media sites.
About a third of Americans (32%) name a source other than these top 10. Another 17% say they don’t have a main source of election news or decline to answer the question.
Our September survey also asked respondents what platform they most often use for election news (e.g., TV, news websites, etc.) and whether they use several specific news outlets (including many of the most common sources mentioned above) as a major or minor source of political news.
Do Americans view their main source of political news as part of the mainstream media?
The September survey also asked Americans whether they think their main source for political news is part of the “mainstream media.”
Across many of the most common sources, large majorities of those who use each source say it is part of the mainstream media. For example, 84% of those who say CNN is their top source of election news say it’s part of the mainstream media, compared with just 5% who say it is not.
A majority of people who list Fox News as their main source say it is part of the mainstream media (61%). But this cable news network has a larger share of users who say that it is not mainstream (28%) than other top news outlets. About one-in-five Americans who name NPR as their main source of political news (19%) also say it is not mainstream media.
A relatively slim majority of Americans who say local TV is their main source of political news (57%) see it as mainstream media, but just 8% say this is not the case. Another 34% of these local TV news consumers say they aren’t sure whether their station is part of the mainstream media.
Partisanship and mainstream media
Overall, among those who listed a main source of political news, six-in-ten say that their source is part of the mainstream media. About a quarter (24%) say it is not mainstream and 16% aren’t sure.
Among those who named a main source of political news, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are more likely than Republicans and GOP leaners to say that their main source of political news is part of the mainstream media (72% vs. 48%).
Meanwhile, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say their main source of political news is not part of the mainstream media (36% vs. 13%).
Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology.
CORRECTION (Nov. 04, 2024): A previous version of the chart “Americans most often say Fox News, CNN are main sources for political news” overstated the figure for “Other” in 2021. This change does not affect this post’s analysis or overall findings.
