Pew Research Center Journalism and Media

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans who say they voted for Donald Trump in the general election relied heavily on Fox News as their main source of election news leading up to the 2016 election, whereas Hillary Clinton voters named an array of different sources, with no one source named by more than one-in-five of her supporters. The survey was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016, among 4,183 adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

When voters were asked to write in their “main source” for election news, four-in-ten Trump voters named Fox News. The next most-common main source among Trump voters, CNN, was named by only 8% of his voters. Clinton voters, however, did not coalesce around any one source. CNN was named more than any other, but at 18% had nowhere near the dominance that Fox News had among Trump voters. Instead, the choices of Clinton voters were more spread out. MSNBC, Facebook, local television news, NPR, ABC, The New York Times and CBS were all named by between 5% and 9% of her voters. What’s more, though Fox News tops the list of sources among Trump voters, only 3% of Clinton voters named it as their main source.

Sixteen years after Pew Research Center’s first study of digital communication in a presidential campaign, social media is central to candidates’ outreach to the public, changing the role and nature of the campaign website. While the candidate website still serves as a hub for information and organization, it has become leaner and less interactive compared with four years ago. Campaigns are active on social media though even here the message remains a very controlled one, leaving fewer ways overall for most voters to engage and take part. Two separate studies examining the campaign websites of Hillary Clinton, Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Donald Trump from May 1-June 15, 2016, and on Facebook and Twitter from May 11-May 31, 2016, find that:

• Clinton’s campaign has almost entirely bypassed the news media while Trump draws heavily on news articles
• On websites, citizen content is minimized or excluded altogether; in social media, Trump stands out for highlighting posts by members of the public.
• None of the three websites featured any distinct section addressing specific voting groups or segments of the population – a popular feature of campaign websites in 2008 and 2012.
• Facebook and Twitter usher in a new age in audiovisual capabilities.