Where Americans get their news
Where do Americans get their news?
Television is still the single most common place U.S. adults say they often get news, at 32 percent in 2025, followed by news websites or apps at 27 percent and social media at 21 percent. Within social media, Facebook and YouTube lead, at 38 percent and 35 percent of all adults reporting they regularly get news there.
- Television has fallen from 40 percent often in 2020 to 32 percent in 2025.
- News websites or apps moved from 34 percent to 27 percent across the same years.
- Social media sits at 21 percent often, close to where it was in 2020.
- Podcasts are the only platform in the set that rose, from 6 percent to 10 percent.
- Radio fell from 16 percent to 11 percent.
Social media next to the older pathways
| Platform | Type | 2020 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Television | Broadcast or print | 40 | 32 |
| Radio | Broadcast or print | 16 | 11 |
| News websites or apps | Digital | 34 | 27 |
| Search | Digital | 23 | 19 |
| Social media | Digital | 23 | 21 |
| Podcasts | Digital | 6 | 10 |
How to read these numbers
Social media is one pathway, not the whole picture
Read next to the older platforms, social media is large but not dominant. More adults still say they often get news from television than from social media, and news websites or apps remain ahead of it as well. What has changed is that the older pathways are shrinking while social media holds roughly steady, so its share of the remaining attention grows without its own number rising much.
Within social media, the sites are not interchangeable
Facebook and YouTube reach the largest share of all U.S. adults for news. TikTok climbed from 3 percent of adults in 2020 to 20 percent in 2025, the fastest move in the set, while X fell from 15 percent to 12 percent. Threads and Bluesky carry no 2020 reading because neither existed in that wave, so they appear as a single 2025 point rather than growth from zero.
Reach and intensity are different measures
A site can reach few adults while nearly all of its own users treat it as a news source. Among people who use each site, 57 percent of X users and 55 percent of TikTok users say they regularly get news there, higher than the share of all adults who do. These per-site figures describe each platform’s own audience, so they are not comparable across sites with very different audience sizes.
Trust moves separately from use
Use of a pathway does not track trust in it. Trust in the information from national news organizations fell from 77 percent in 2016 to 58 percent in 2024, while local news organizations stayed higher throughout. Trust in the information from social media sites has stayed the lowest of the three across every wave.
The data behind the answer
Share of U.S. adults who often get news from each platform
| Year | Value | Provenance |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Television 40 · News websites or apps 34 · Search 23 · Social media 23 · Radio 16 · Podcasts 6 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2021 | Television 36 · News websites or apps 28 · Search 20 · Social media 19 · Radio 15 · Podcasts 7 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2022 | Television 31 · News websites or apps 25 · Search 18 · Social media 17 · Radio 13 · Podcasts 6 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2023 | Television 32 · News websites or apps 29 · Search 27 · Social media 19 · Radio 16 · Podcasts 9 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2024 | Television 33 · News websites or apps 29 · Search 23 · Social media 25 · Radio 11 · Podcasts 9 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2025 | Television 32 · News websites or apps 27 · Search 19 · Social media 21 · Radio 11 · Podcasts 10 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
Pew Research Center, News Platform Fact Sheet, published September 25, 2025 and fielded August 18 to 24, 2025. Values are the share saying they often get news that way, so the lines do not sum to 100 and a respondent can appear on several lines. Print is not plotted because the item wording changed, it was asked as print publications from 2020 to 2024, reading 10, 10, 8, 9 and 6 percent, then as printed newspapers or magazines in 2025, reading 7 percent. Email newsletters and AI chatbots were first asked in 2025, at 6 and 2 percent, so they carry no trend. Adults who do not use the internet were not asked the digital items and are counted with those who said never.
Primary source: Pew Research Center, News Platform Fact Sheet (September 25, 2025)
Share with a lot or some trust in the information from each source
| Year | Value | Provenance |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Local news organizations 82 · National news organizations 77 · Social media sites 34 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2017 | Local news organizations 85 · National news organizations 72 · Social media sites 35 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2018 | Local news organizations 83 · National news organizations 70 · Social media sites 33 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2019 | Local news organizations 78 · National news organizations 66 · Social media sites 27 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2021 | Local news organizations 75 · National news organizations 58 · Social media sites 26 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2022 | Local news organizations 71 · National news organizations 61 · Social media sites 33 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2024 | Local news organizations 74 · National news organizations 58 · Social media sites 37 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
| 2025 | Local news organizations 80 · National news organizations 67 · Social media sites 42 (percent of U.S. adults) | verified |
Pew Research Center tracking of trust in information, 2016 through 2025. Each value combines a lot and some trust. Years without a published reading are left as gaps rather than filled. Pew fielded the question twice in 2019, in July reading 75 national, 86 local and 39 social, and again in October and November reading 66, 78 and 27, and the later fielding is the one plotted. The 2025 point is the March 10 to 16 wave. A later wave fielded September 8 to 14, 2025 reported 56 percent for national and 70 percent for local, with the social media figure not itemized in the published topline, so that wave is not plotted. The social media item wording changed across waves as named platforms changed, and in 2016 it was asked of web users only.
Primary source: Pew Research Center, trust in information from news organizations and social media sites
Sourcing and method
All figures come from Pew Research Center fact sheets and tracked survey questions, transcribed from the published tables rather than read off a chart. Where a year was not published, it is left as a gap. The percentages describe different questions, so a reading for how often someone gets news from a platform is not the same measure as whether they regularly get news on a specific site.
Every statistic with its primary source · Chapter 8: Social Media and the Collapse of Shared Reality · Media trust statistics