- The bulk of media consumption is not news related, indicating that the reasons that Americans are uninformed about current news is simply because they choose not to inform themselves.

Detailed Breakdown of News and Non-News Categories of Americans' Media Consumption 

- Measured in minutes/person.
- Americans devote over 7.5 hours/day on average to media consumption (which includes watching TV, streaming videos or music, gaming, going on social media, or browsing the web).
- Younger Americans spend a greater amount of time on mobile devices and less time watching TV than average; this pattern is reversed for older Americans.

Johns Hopkins University

- First, national TV programming was measured, then local programming was measured using a subset of the national panel.
- TV news consumption was defined as the amount of time devoted to watching any of the ~400 programs defined as "news" (including categories such as morning shows, late-night comedy shows, and hard news).
- Next, desktop and mobile media consumption were measured using Comscore's panel, which breaks out the total amount of time spent on different types of media sites by demographic bucket.
- Desktop and mobile media consumption was defined as the amount of time spent on any article that had been published on one of more than 800 websites. Correspondingly, fake news consumption was defined as the time spent on 1 of 98 websites identified as sources of fake news.
- Third, Nielsen's nationally representative desktop-only web panel was used to measure news consumption on the top four social media sites (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit) and on the top three search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo).

Materials and Methods in "Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem" Study

Allen, Jennifer & Howland, Baird & Mobius, Markus & Rothschild, David & Watts, Duncan. (2020). Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem. Science Advances. 6. eaay3539. 10.1126/sciadv.aay3539. 

Learn Before

Related

Learn After