- Fake news consumption is only 1% of Americans' daily news consumption.
- In this case, fake news is defined extremely broadly and includes highly biased and hyper partisan news sites.
- Therefore, these estimates of the prevalence of fake news likely overestimate the actual prevalence (although adopting stricter definitions makes no discernible difference).
- Fake news stories are most likely to be found on social media; older viewers are heavier consumers of these stories than younger viewers.
- Majority-fake news consumers do exist but are extremely rare; most of them consume a very small amount of online news of any kind.

Breakdown of News Consumption by Age

- When Americans do consume news, the bulk of it is overwhelmingly via TV.
- While everyone is exposed to a significant amount of daily TV news, 44% of the sample is not exposed to any online news at all.

Johns Hopkins University

- 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 

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