Title: U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided | Pew Research Center
Headings: U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided
U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided
Deep partisan divisions exist in the news sources Americans trust, distrust and rely on
How we did this
How we asked about trust and distrust
The Fox News phenomenon
The impact of political ideology on Americans’ trust in news outlets
The divide widens over time
Pagination

Content: You can also find the questions we asked, and the answers the public provided, in this topline. As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments. Overall, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view many heavily relied on sources across a range of platforms as untrustworthy. At the same time, Democrats and independents who lean Democratic see most of those sources as credible and rely on them to a far greater degree, according to the survey of 12,043 U.S. adults conducted Oct. 29–Nov. 11, 2019, on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel. These divides are even more pronounced between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. Moreover, evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years. A comparison to a similar study by the Center of web-using U.S. adults in 2014 finds that Republicans have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats’ confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened. How we asked about trust and distrust
Respondents were first asked if they heard of the source, then if so, whether they trust or distrust it for political and election news and whether they got political and election news there in the past week. The two examples below show one outlet (CBS News) that is heard of by the vast majority of U.S. adults and is also trusted by far more people than distrusted, and another outlet (Politico) that has been heard of by far fewer adults (44%) but is still trusted by more people than distrusted, even though just 13% of the public expresses trust.