Where Americans Get News Relates to How They Engage in Public Life

News outlets that heavily cover politics are among the sources whose audiences contain a disproportionately high share of the most engaged Americans.

U.S. news sources like CNN, Fox News and The New York Times tend to attract audiences that differ from one another by partisanship and education level. These distinct audiences also engage in public life in varying ways, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative.

When we categorize Americans based on patterns in their political activity, civic involvement, religious attendance and attention to news, those who are most engaged across all these areas also tend to be overrepresented in the audiences for certain online and print news sources – particularly outlets that focus on politics. Meanwhile, TV news audiences tend to look more similar to Americans overall in how they engage in public life.

These findings come from Center data on the audiences of 30 prominent news sources, combined with data from our recent study examining how Americans participate in society across a range of behaviors. This type of analysis allows us to see how certain news audiences fit into our four “engagement groups”: Mobilizers, Connectors, Spectators and Outsiders.

Overall, Americans in the most engaged groups tend be overrepresented in the audiences of most news sources. This makes sense since news consumption is among the factors we used to build these categories.