United States
Threats to press freedom in the United States have sharpened in 2026 amid civil strife at home and a new US-led war in the Middle East, with President Donald Trump threatening to prosecute reporters for treason. Meanwhile, corporate shuffles endorsed by the White House may augur a lasting rightward shift in the US media landscape.
In mid-2025 CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The comedian had mocked as a ‘big fat bribe’ a $16m payout by CBS owner Paramount – then seeking FCC approval for a sale to Skydance Media, headed by the son of billionaire and vocal Trump ally Larry Ellison – to settle what was widely seen as a baseless lawsuit by Trump over coverage of the 2024 presidential race. In September, another late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, was suspended at Brendan Carr’s prompting after the FCC chair threatened regulatory action against ABC and parent Disney, but Kimmel was reinstated in the wake of public outcry.
The new Paramount Skydance moved quickly to fulfil editorial pledges made to win approval for the merger, installing the former head of a conservative think tank as ombudsman at CBS News and naming anti-woke polemicist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, after purchasing her conservative opinion site The Free Press for a reported $150m. In February, Paramount Skydance struck a deal to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns cable news giant CNN.
In January, the long-running saga over the fate of TikTok’s US operations, which a 2024 law requires Chinese owner ByteDance to sell off, closed: a joint venture led by software giant Oracle, owned by Larry Ellison, will run the US spinoff. Meanwhile, Google is preparing to appeal an April 2025 antitrust ruling that its adtech business constitutes an illegal monopoly. And in a landmark March 2026 ruling, a California court found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive services that potentially harm young users; the firms are appealing the verdict.
Trump’s disdain for the news media has been evident in a slate of lawsuits. In February 2026, Trump filed a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the BBC for editing a speech Trump gave before the 6 January Capitol riots that appeared in the October 2024 Panorama documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’; the BBC’s director-general and head of news subsequently resigned. In September 2025, Trump accused the New York Times of defamation over coverage that he said sought to ‘undermine his candidacy and disparage his reputation as a successful businessman’, according to the Times. Trump also threatened criminal prosecution for news organisations that reported information about a US fighter jet shot down in Iran in April before official government communication.
The Trump administration has implemented additional access barriers for journalists, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s efforts to deny an NBC News reporter Pentagon access, removal of several journalists from their on-site workstations, and creation of new restrictions for credentialled military reporters. A federal judge ruled twice in favour of the New York Times that the policies violated the First Amendment. Further, independent journalist Georgia Fort and former CNN host Don Lemon were arrested in Minneapolis while covering an 18 January demonstration against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns.
Washington Post owner – and Amazon chief – Jeff Bezos announced that a third of the newsroom would be laid off, including the sports desk, significant cuts to the international desk (including in Ukraine), the Middle East desk, and the technology reporter covering Amazon. The Metro desk was reduced from more than 40 reporters to 12. Other major newsrooms also experienced layoffs.
Meanwhile, public media in the US face an uncertain future. In May 2025, Trump made an executive order calling on federal agencies to discontinue funding NPR and PBS over what he called ‘left-wing propaganda’ and biased coverage. In March 2026, a federal judge ruled that the executive order violated the First Amendment. The decision, however, would likely have little impact on the loss of $500m in annual federal funding that Congress approved. The Trump administration also continued its dismantling of Voice of America, a federally funded international broadcaster serving countries with limited press freedom.
Collaborative local journalism continues to thrive in a challenging US media landscape. Among other projects, a joint effort by six Chicago newsrooms documented federal immigration agents using tear gas on nonviolent protesters in defiance of a court order. Several were members of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a hub for independent newsrooms which has risen from 150 outlets a decade ago to more than 500 today.
Lucas Graves
University Carlos III, Madrid
Joy Jenkins
University of Missouri
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Methodological note
The online pay numbers are based on a US repoll conducted in March 2026. We use the online payment figures from the repoll in this report, but other reports may be based on the original data (which produced on online payment figure of 13% in the US).
Changing media
In the US, TV news consumption has continued its three-year decline, while online and social media consumption are seeing slight year-on-year increases. Print media have been declining steadily for over a decade.
Pay for online news
16%
(-4)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
45%
(+3)
Trust in news overall
25%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Overall news trust fell 5 percentage points in 2026, reaching a new low for the United States since we started tracking trust in 2015. Trust scores for Fox News and CBS News both fell significantly, by 10pp. The most trusted news brands continue to be local television outlets and regional or local newspapers.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
64/180
Score 62.61
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
