Pew Research Center

Political divides in the American news landscape do not end with Americans’ preferences for different news sources; rather, they extend to how members of the U.S. Congress communicate with constituents in the digital age. Between January 2015 and July 2017, nearly half (48%) of the links to national news outlets that members of Congress shared on Facebook were to outlets predominantly linked to by members of just one party, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

Decades after internet access became widely available, Pew Research Center surveys show that about a tenth of American adults (12%) remain offline. But what happens when some of them take the plunge and connect?

Fight for the Future (FFTF) called out Pew Research over mistakes and what it said were out of context characterizations and mischaracterizations in Pew's analysis of the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality docket. 

Network neutrality regulations underpin the digital lives of many Americans, yet it is challenging to survey the public on such an inherently complex and technical subject. For this reason, Pew Research Center set out to analyze the opinions of those who had taken the time to submit their thoughts to the Federal Communications Commission.  Among the most notable findings:

Americans are more likely than ever to get news from multiple social media sites, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. About a quarter of all US adults (26%) get news from two or more social media sites, up from 15% in 2013 and 18% in 2016. But there is considerable variation in the extent to which each site’s news users get news from other sites, and which sites those are. Facebook claims the largest share of social media news consumers, and its news users are much more likely to rely solely on that site for news. Just under half (45%) of U.S. adults use Facebook for news.

Rural Americans have made large gains in adopting digital technology in recent years, but they remain less likely than nonrural adults to have home broadband, smartphones and other devices. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of rural Americans say they have a broadband internet connection at home, up from about a third (35%) in 2007, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2016. Rural Americans are now 10 percentage points less likely than Americans overall to have home broadband; in 2007, there was a 16-point gap between rural Americans (35%) and all U.S. adults (51%) on this question.

Rural residents also go online less frequently than their urban and suburban counterparts. Roughly six-in-ten adults (58%) who live in rural communities say they use the internet on at least a daily basis, compared with more than three-quarters of those in urban (80%) or suburban (76%) areas. Meanwhile, roughly one-in-five rural adults (19%) say they never go online, compared with 11% of those who live in urban communities and 10% of those who live in the suburbs.

The local television landscape in the US has undergone major changes in recent years, as a wave of consolidations and station purchases have made some broadcast media owners considerably larger. In 2004, the five largest companies in local TV – Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray, Tegna and Tribune – owned, operated or serviced 179 full-power stations. That number grew to 378 in 2014 and to 443 in 2016. If approved by regulators, Sinclair’s acquisition of Tribune would bring its total to 208, by far the largest among the media companies. As of 2016, these five companies owned an estimated 37% of all full-power local TV stations in the country, as identified in a Pew Research Center analysis of BIA Kelsey data.

Democrats and Republicans, who already tend to place their trust in different news sources and rely on different outlets for political news, now disagree more than ever on a fundamental issue of the news media’s role in society: whether news organizations’ criticism of political leaders primarily keeps them from doing things they shouldn’t – or keeps them from doing their job.

Today, in the early days of the Trump administration, roughly nine-in-ten Democrats (89%) say news media criticism keeps leaders in line (sometimes called the news media’s “watchdog role”), while only about four-in-ten Republicans (42%) say the same. That is a 47-percentage-point gap, which stands in sharp contrast to January-February 2016, when Americans were asked the same question. Then, in the midst of the presidential primary season, nearly the same share of Democrats (74%) and Republicans (77%) supported the watchdog role. This partisan split is found in other attitudes about the news media, though none in so dramatic a fashion as with the watchdog role. Compared with 2016, Democrats and Republicans are more divided on whether the press favors one side in its political coverage, on how much trust they have in national news media, and on how good a job national news organizations are doing in keeping them informed.