Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton voters had different diets in the media, but a study finds common ground on Facebook as a major source of news, even if their individual foods have little resemblance to each other. Facebook was the top non-television source for election news cited by supporters of both candidates, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. The importation of the social media site as the motor of political news has been underlined by the persistent controversy of the people who use it to spread false news.
8% of Clinton voters and 7% of Trump voters named Facebook as their primary source of election news, Pew said. "That was a pretty important finding," said Jeffrey Gottfried, principal investigator for the Washington-based think tank. Facebook does not produce news; Members share stories from a multitude of sources and their news sources tend to reflect the politics of their Facebook friends.
With a multitude of websites serving fake news stories with no basis in fact, Facebook announced last month that it would partner with external fact checkers to point to particularly atrocious examples being broadcast on the social networking site. While other digital brands like Breitbart News, BuzzFeed, Drudge Report and Huffington Post received much publicity during the campaign, they received little attention from Pew voters polled.
Forty percent of Trump's voters cited Fox News Channel as their main source of campaign news, the winner by a huge margin. The second most cited news source for Trump supporters was CNN, at 8 percent. "This is very much in line with the previous research we have done," Gottfried said. Pew did not ask similar questions after past campaigns, but in a 2014 poll, 47 percent of conservatives cited Fox as their top news source, he said.
The finding demonstrates Fox's continued strength with conservative voters, and probably explains why the network did not change direction after the expulsion last summer of its founder and chief executive Roger Ailes after allegations of sexual harassment.
CNN was the main news source named by Clinton supporters, with 18 percent, Pew said. Although it was twice as much as any other news source, Clinton's voters were much more likely to have more diverse diets. MSNBC, with 9 percent, was second among Clinton voters. That network was named by only 1 percent of Trump's voters.
National Public Radio was another source of high-profile news by Clinton voters, but by few Trump supporters, the poll said. The New York Times was the newspaper's most cited news source, with 3 percent of all voters saying it was its main news source, Pew said.
Pew found little difference in media choices among Republicans who supported different candidates during the primary, but real differences between Clinton or Bernie Sanders Democratic supporters. For example, 4 percent of Sanders voters quoted the Reddit online forum as the main news source, with few Clinton voters saying the same thing.
Pew surveyed 4,183 adults who are members of their US trend panel between November 29 and December 12. The margin of error is 2.7 percent among all voters.
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