Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Journalism & Media
June 1, 2015
By Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried and Katerina Eva Matsa
Among Millennials, Facebook is far and away the most common source for news about government and politics. When asked whether they got political and government news from each of 42 sources in the previous week (36 specific news outlets, local TV generally and 5 social networking sites), about six-in-ten Web-using Millennials (61%) reported getting political news on Facebook. That is 17 points higher than the next most consumed source for Millennials (CNN at 44%).
Millennials’ reliance on Facebook for political news is also almost exactly on par with Baby Boomers’ reliance on local TV (60%). In fact, Baby Boomers and Millennials demonstrate nearly inverse habits when it comes to local TV and Facebook. Among Millennials, 61% got political news on Facebook and 37% from local TV. Among Baby Boomers, it’s 39% from Facebook and 60% from local TV. Gen Xers fall in the middle for both, with 51% getting political news on Facebook and 46% doing so from local TV.
Millennials are also more reliant than other generations on Google News. A third (33%) get political news there, about twice the percentage of Baby Boomers (15%) and Gen Xers (18%). There is not, though, the same level of disparity when it comes to Yahoo News – perhaps tied in part to the early days of Yahoo as an email domain and portal; 27% of Millennials get political news from Yahoo, on par with Gen Xers (25%), but somewhat higher than Baby Boomers (21%).
A source turned to at similar, and rather high rates across all three generations is CNN: 44% of Millennials got political news there in the past week as did 45% of Gen Xers and 43% of Baby Boomers.
Beyond local TV, other sources Baby Boomers rely on at higher rates than both Millennials and Gen Xers include Fox News, MSNBC, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, PBS, the Sean Hannity Show, the Rush Limbaugh Show and the Ed Schultz Show.
While these data do not speak to the amount of time spent with news, they do suggest that the sources for and the pathways to political news vary substantially across generations. This sortable interactive provides the full breakdown of the rate at which each generation gets news about government and politics from each of the sources asked about.
When asked separately to name their main source for news about government and politics (before being asked about the 42 specific sources), only a handful of sources garner double-digit percentages within each of the three generations. CNN, for example, is named most often by both online Millennials and Gen Xers at 21% and 18%, respectively; and among Baby Boomers, 16% name Fox News and 11% name CNN as their main source. About one-in-ten in each of these generations name local TV. All other sources are named by less than 10%.
These findings also suggest the degree to which Facebook, even though it is by far the most common way Millennials get news about government and politics, is not top of mind as their main source for this type of news. Three percent of online Millennials volunteer Facebook when asked for their main source for political news (as do 1% of both Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. This is consistent with our previous research indicating that getting news on Facebook is largely an incidental experience.