Where Americans are getting their news in the digital age

According to a report by Axios, the White House sent a letter this week warning Politico that it must retract or correct recent articles about Chief of Staff Susie Wiles or face consequences including possible legal action. At the center of the dispute: Politico reported last week that President Donald Trump was considering replacing Wiles, which Trump called “fake news.”

In the letter, White House Counsel Will Scharf wrote that “freedom of the press is not a professional exemption from accountability.” Politico is also among three outlets that were banned from the White House last month, prompting legal pushback from the news organizations.

We recently asked Americans whether the U.S. government should be able to force a news organization to take down a story in a few different circumstances. While about half of U.S. adults (51%) say this should be possible in cases where the story contains false information, far fewer say the government should be able to do this if a story clearly favors one political side (14%) or is critical of the government (10%), according to a Pew Research Center survey from the Pew-Knight Initiative.

Earlier this week, we added new data from an August 2026 survey to two fact sheets looking at the devices and platforms and social media sites Americans use to get news.

Among the key findings from both fact sheets:

C-SPAN will bring creator-led coverage into its election night lineup, showing YouTube livestreams from The Young Turks and Patrick Bet-David’s PBD Podcast on C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3. Its flagship channel will continue to offer C-SPAN’s traditional results coverage and nonpartisan analysis.

The move is another example of traditional news outlets implementing newer forms of media into their programming. About one-in-five U.S. adults (21%) regularly get news from news influencers on social media, including 38% of adults under 30, according to a 2025 Center survey from the Pew-Knight Initiative. And the share of Americans who regularly get news on YouTube has risen in recent years (from 23% in 2020 to 34% in 2026).

Both The Young Turks and Bet-David bring a political perspective to their coverage, which is common among news influencers on social media, according to our 2024 study.

This week’s chart comes from our recently updated news platform fact sheet. It shows how often U.S. adults get news through various digital pathways. More than half say they often or sometimes get news from search engines, news websites and apps, and social media, while about a third say the same about email newsletters and podcasts.

Fewer get news from artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, but these have become a source of news for more Americans in the past year. As of August 2026, 15% say they get news from AI chatbots at least sometimes, up from 9% in 2025.