Democrats trust more news outlets than Republicans, new Pew tracker shows

Republicans and Democrats live in “nearly inverse news media environments,” a Pew Research Center report found five years ago. Today Pew is following up on that report with the launch of a new interactive tool that tracks how much adults across the political spectrum in the U.S. trust and use 30 news sources, from all the major TV networks to the Joe Rogan Experience and the Tucker Carlson Network.

The data is based on input from a representative sample of 9,482 adults in the U.S. surveyed in March 2025. Unlike the 2020 report, which asked people how they got political and election news in a single week, this survey — and the tracker — were focused on the sources that people regularly rely on to get their news.

Pew didn’t analyze the content of those news sources themselves, but rather focused on how people perceived the content of those sources. A few standout details are below.

1. Democrats and left-leaning independents use and trust a wider range of news sources than Republicans and right-leaning independents.

“Republican news consumers have a more compact media ecosystem,” according to an FAQ that launched with the report. “They rely to a large degree on a small number of outlets and view many established brands as not trustworthy. Democrats, on the other hand, rely on a wider number of outlets.”

Overall, the authors note, Democrats trust more news outlets than Republicans, and the trust charts are practically inverted. Compare how Democrats rank the trustworthiness of each source (the outlier on the left is Breitbart):

To how Republicans rank them (the outlier on the left is HuffPost):

2. Broadcast networks continue to dominate audiences, and they have more ideological overlap than you might expect.

According to the report, “20% of Republicans and GOP leaners regularly consume news from CNN, similar to the share of Democrats who get news from Fox News (18%).” After Fox, Republicans said they were most likely to get their news from ABC News (27%), NBC News (24%) and CBS News (22%). But, the report’s authors point out, “while roughly a quarter trust each of the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), larger shares of Republicans say they distrust the networks.”

Here are the responses from all U.S. adults:

Compare with responses from Republicans and independents who lean Republican:

3. A couple of personalities loom large on the right.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and the Tucker Carlson Network (a streaming network that the former Fox News host launched in 2023) have solidly conservative audiences. The Joe Rogan Experience is a particularly important source of news on the right: it was the most-cited news source cited by Republicans that wasn’t a broadcast network, coming in fifth overall.

You can explore the interactive trust tool, and the full report, for yourself at the Pew website.