The share of Americans who say they follow the news all or most of the time has decreased since 2016, according to nearly a decade’s worth of Pew Research Center surveys. This shift comes amid changes in the platforms people use for news and declining trust in news organizations. As of August 2025, 36% of U.S. adults say they follow the news all or most of the time. That is down from 51% in 2016.

To examine how closely Americans follow the news, Pew Research Center conducted this analysis using 11 survey waves from 2016 to 2025. The most recent survey was of 5,153 U.S. adults from Aug. 18 to 24, 2025.

Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. This kind of recruitment gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection. Interviews were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other factors. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the methodology.