PRINCETON, N.J. — Television is the main source of news for more than half of U.S. adults, according to a June Gallup poll. Fifty-five percent of respondents named some sort of TV as their main source for news.
“Half of adults aged 18 to 29 and half aged 30 to 49 identify television as their main source of news. This is nearly double the rate for the Internet even among these more tech-savvy populations,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad wrote. “However, it does differ from older generations who put relatively more emphasis on TV and less on the Internet.”
The 50-64 set skewed 58 percent toward TV news; those 65 and older, 68 percent. Just six percent of the Social Security qualifiers named the Internet as their main news source.
Of the overall sample, 18 percent preferred the Internet (including 2 percent naming Facebook, Twitter and social media); 9 percent, print; 6 percent, radio; 2 percent “word of mouth,” and the rest followed some other form of media or none at all.
The TV news breakdown was as illustrated in the accompanying graphic.
Gallup queried 2,048 U.S. adults 18 and above, from June 20-24. The firm said “for results based on these samples of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.”
