New Report From Pew Research: “How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review”

From the Introduction to the Report:

Americans are divided – that much is obvious after a contentious presidential election and transition, and in the midst of a politicized pandemic that has prompted a wide range of reactions.

But in addition to the familiar fault line of political partisanship, a look back at Pew Research Center’s American News Pathways project finds there have consistently been dramatic divides between different groups of Americans based on where people get their information about what is going on in the world.

From November 2019 through December 2020, the Pathways project explored how Americans’ news habits and attitudes related to what they heard, perceived and knew about the 2020 presidential election and COVID-19. The research was based on 10 different surveys conducted on the Center’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of U.S. adults. Each survey consisted of about 9,000 or more U.S. adults.

Over the course of the year, as part of the project, the Center published more than 50 individual analyses and made data from more than 580 survey questions available to the public in an interactive data tool. We now have the opportunity to look back at the findings over the full course of the year and gather together the key takeaways that emerged.

Roadmap to the Report

This report explores these and other key findings around five areas of discovery. Chapter 1 examines the evidence pointing to media “echo chambers” on the left and the right, and a new analysis of the Americans who consistently turned to these echo chambers over the course of the study. Chapter 2 analyzes Trump’s role as a source of news about the coronavirus outbreak and the presidential election. Chapter 3 explores Americans’ concern about and views of misinformation. Chapter 4 looks at how Americans who rely on social media for news stand apart. And Chapter 5 looks back on views of the COVID-19 outbreak and media coverage over time.

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Filed under: Data Files, News