How Did Americans Get Election News? Trump Backers Favored Fox; Clinton Supporters Favored CNN And MSNBC

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters got their news from very different sources during the election campaign, a Pew Research Center poll indicated Wednesday.

Fox News Channel dominated the coverage, with 19 percent of voters saying they relied on the cable network for information, followed by CNN at 13 percent, Facebook at 8 percent and local television stations at 7 percent. Only 6 percent of voters said they relied on the New York Times or local newspapers.

A majority of voters (54 percent) said they got most of their news from television. Eighteen percent said they got their political fix from Google News, followed by the Huffington Post (17 percent), Yahoo (12 percent), BuzzFeed (7 percent), Breitbart (6 percent) or the Drudge Report (6 percent).

Forty percent of Trump-backers said they got their election news from Fox News Channel compared to 3 percent of Clinton voters. Eight percent of Trump supporters got their news from CNN and 7 percent from Facebook.

Clinton supporters were more inclined to get their information from CNN (19 percent), MSNBC (9 percent), Facebook (8 Percent), local TV (8 percent) and NPR (7 percent).

Newspapers didn’t show up as an information source at all among Trump supporters while 5 percent of Clinton voters said they relied on the New York Times and 4 percent looked to local newspapers.

Pew noted that though digital media, though they played a major role in the campaign, did not show up as a main source of news for either group. Breitbart, an early supporter of Trump, was cited by just 1 percent of those surveyed as a main news source while BuzzFeed, which broke a number of stories during the campaign, was not cited by any of the respondents.

The Huffington Post, which initially said it would cover the Trump campaign on its entertainment pages and attached notes to stories about his labeling him a “liar,” was cited by only 1 percent of those queried.

The survey queried 4,183 adults Nov. 29-Dec. 12 and had an error rate of 2.7 percentage points.