Local news is playing an important role for Americans during COVID-19 outbreak
Some 61% of U.S. adults say they follow COVID-19 news at both the national and local level equally, and 23% say they pay more attention to local news.
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Black, Hispanic and white adults feel the news media misunderstand them, but for very different reasons
59% of Americans think news organizations do not understand people like them, while a minority – 37% – say they do feel understood.
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As COVID-19 Emerged in U.S., Facebook Posts About It Appeared in a Wide Range of Public Pages, Groups
In March 2020, about three-quarters (74%) of public Facebook posts about COVID-19 linked to news organizations, while just 1% linked to health and science sites.
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Black U.S. adults follow many COVID-19 news topics more closely, discuss the outbreak more frequently
Black adults were much more likely than whites and somewhat more likely than Hispanic adults to frequently discuss the pandemic with others.
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Around three-in-ten Americans are very confident they could fact-check news about COVID-19
Americans’ confidence in checking COVID-19 information aligns closely with their confidence in checking the accuracy of news stories broadly.
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Americans Who Rely Most on White House for COVID-19 News More Likely to Downplay the Pandemic
People in this group are most likely to say the outbreak has been made too big of a deal and journalists have been exaggerating the risks.
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44% of Americans say they talk about the coronavirus outbreak most or almost all of the time
31% of U.S. adults say they discuss the outbreak with other people most of the time; another 13% say they talk about it almost all of the time.
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SXSW 2020 Online Session: Misinformation and the 2020 U.S. Election
Amy Mitchell (Pew Research Center), Philip Howard (University of Oxford), Jane Lytvynenko (Buzzfeed News) and Lori Robertson (Factcheck.org) discuss misinformation during the coronavirus outbreak, and ahead of the 2020 presidential election, as part of SXSW 2020’s virtual sessions.
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Fewer Americans now say media exaggerated COVID-19 risks, but big partisan gaps persist
The percentage who say journalists have exaggerated the risks of the outbreak has decreased notably in recent weeks.
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Most Americans say COVID-19 has changed news reporting, but many are unsure how it’s affected the industry
The public’s sense about the pandemic’s impact on the financial well-being of most news organizations is far from clear.
