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In today’s email:
- Featured story: NPR sues Trump over order to cut funding
- New from Pew Research Center: News influencers on Bluesky
- In other news: California, Google reduce their funding to local journalism initiative
- Looking ahead: New restrictions on Pentagon press coverage
- Chart of the week: More news influencers on Bluesky posted there as first three months of 2025 progressed
🔥 Featured story
The tensions between President Donald Trump and U.S. public broadcasters continued to play out this week with two major developments:
- NPR sued the Trump administration over an executive order aimed at cutting all the organization’s federal funding.
- Reports emerged that the executive producer of a PBS documentary pushed to remove a scene critical of Trump. Some see this as part of a recent pattern of media executives trying to temper coverage of Trump in fear of political retribution.
About a quarter of U.S. adults (24%) say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2025. A larger share (43%) say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government, while 33% say they are not sure.
Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to regularly get news from NPR and PBS and to trust them as sources of news.
🚨 New from Pew Research Center
Last year, we identified a sample of 500 news influencers on major social media sites. A new analysis reexamines this group of influencers to see how many of them are now on Bluesky, which many have described as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter).
The share of news influencers in our 2024 sample with a Bluesky account roughly doubled in the four months after Election Day 2024, from 21% beforehand to 43% by March 2025. Influencers who explicitly identify with the political left are especially likely to be on Bluesky. At the same time, most of these influencers – including left-leaning ones – are also on X and post there frequently.
📌 In other news
- California, Google reduce their funding to local journalism initiative
- Press freedom advocacy group threatens to sue if Paramount settles with Trump over 60 Minutes interview
- FTC investigates Media Matters over ad boycotts targeting Elon Musk’s X
- Business Insider to cut 21% of staff amid shift toward AI and live events
- The New York Times and Amazon sign AI licensing deal
- Washington Post Tech Guild votes to form a union
- A look at teen-led local newspaper on Long Island
- Former LA Times reporter sues Los Angeles County, alleging violation of First Amendment rights
📅 Looking ahead
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced new restrictions on journalists covering the Pentagon, banning reporters from many areas of the building unless they are accompanied by a government escort. While Hegseth said the moves were to protect national security, the Pentagon Press Association called them “a direct attack on the freedom of the press and America’s right to know what its military is doing.”
Seven-in-ten Americans are at least somewhat concerned about potential restrictions on press freedom, according to a Center survey conducted earlier this year. At the time of the survey in February and March, Americans who had been paying closer attention to news about the actions and initiatives of the Trump administration were more likely to be concerned. Among those who said they had been following news about the administration very or fairly closely, about half (49%) were extremely or very concerned, compared with 29% of those who had not been closely following such news.
📊 Chart of the week
This week, our chart comes from a new analysis of posting habits by news influencers on Bluesky and X (formerly Twitter). During the first three months of 2025, an increasing share of news influencers on Bluesky posted on the platform. About half (54%) of news influencers on Bluesky posted there at least once in the first full week of January. This share grew to 66% in the last full week of March.
During the same period, X remained popular but saw a small decline in posting: 92% of news influencers on X posted there in early January, compared with 87% in late March.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by Anna Jackson.
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