Reuters Institute – Digital News Report 2025. “The most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide. This year’s report comes at a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, not to mention climate breakdown and continuing destructive conflicts around the world. Against that background, evidence-based and analytical journalism should be thriving, with newspapers flying off shelves, broadcast media and web traffic booming. But we find traditional news media struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions…Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States where polling overlapped with the first few weeks of the new Trump administration. Social media news use was sharply up (+6 percentage points) but there was no ‘Trump bump’ for traditional sources…”

NiemanLab: “For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source. Traditional news sources are losing influence in the United States. For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”

BBC: “Social media and video networks have become the main source of news in the US, overtaking traditional TV channels and news websites, research suggests. More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube – overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute. “The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries,” a report found. Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. The report’s author Nic Newman said the rise of social video and personality-driven news “represents another significant challenge for traditional publishers”. The institute also highlighted a trend for some politicians to give their time to sympathetic online hosts rather than mainstream interviewers. It said populist politicians around the world are “increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse”. Despite their popularity, online influencers and personalities were named as a major source of false or misleading information by almost half of people worldwide (47%) – putting them level with politicians. The report also stated that usage of X for news is “stable or increasing across many markets”, with the biggest uplift in the US. It added that since Elon Musk took over the network in 2022, “many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently”. In the US, the proportion that self-identified as being on the right tripled after Musk’s takeover. In the UK, right-wing X audiences have almost doubled. Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are “making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news”, it stated…”