By David Pendered

June 23, 2025 – Social media and video content have overtaken legacy media as the go-to source for news in the United States, despite the vast majority of consumers saying they don’t trust it, according to new research by the Reuters Institute.

The report’s overview observes that 54 percent of Americans said they accessed news via social media and video networks, “overtaking both TV news (50 percent) and news websites/apps (48 percent) for the first time.”

The research points toward the stunning rate of change in how Americans’ learn about today’s world – from news about their governments, foreign affairs, elected officials and educators right down to the results of pee wee sports.

For instance, the findings in the Reuters Institute’s global 2025 Digital News Report, issued June 17, found that 22 percent of the U.S. sample said they had come across podcaster Joe Rogan in the week after President Trump’s inauguration. The rate exceeded that of the weekly use of ABC News (19 percent), CBS News (19 percent) and NBC/MSNBC News (16 percent). Fox News stood at 32 percent and CNN at 28 percent in terms of weekly use, the survey showed.

Nonetheless, consumers are aware of the danger of fake news attributed to some creators of social media and video streams. In the U.S., 73 percent of respondents to the survey “say they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online.”

U.S. consumers distrust their politicians’ online messages. In terms of “underlying sources of false or misleading information,” 57 percent of U.S. consumers cite politicians as the biggest threat. The U.S. rate is near that of Kenya (59 percent), Eastern Europe including Serbia (59 percent), Nigeria (58 percent) and Hungary (54 percent).

YouGov fielded the survey from mid-January through February through a global online survey. Results were weighted for political and other standard data. A margin-of-error cannot be determined because of the nature of the survey, the authors noted, and results cannot be used to compare countries because of variations of online access and usage.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is part of Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations. Funding comes from the Thompson Reuters Foundation, other foundations, non-profits and partners in industry and academics.

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