Survey: Fox Was Dominant News Source for Trump Voters

Fox News Channel was the main source of news for 40% of the voters who put Donald Trump into the White House, while Hillary Clinton's supporters got their news from a number of outlets, with none of those getting more than 20%. Only 3% of Clinton supporters said Fox was their main source of news.

That's according to a new Pew Research Center survey, conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12 among a representative sample of 4,183 adults.

The next most common main news source for voters who elected Trump was CNN, which the President-elect has attacked as fake news, though that network was cited by only 8%.

The full Trump voter breakdown was FNC, 40%; CNN, 8%; Facebook, 7%; NBC, 6%; Local TV, 5%; ABC, 3%; CBS, 3%; and local radio, 3%.

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CNN was the main source of news for Clinton voters, cited by 18% of respondents. MSNBC, Facebook, local television news, NPR, ABC, The New York Times and CBS were each cited by between 5% and 9% of those respondents as their main source.

The full Clinton voter breakdown was CNN, 18%; MSNBC, 9%; Facebook, 8%; local TV news, 8%; NPR, 7%; ABC, 6%; The New York Times, 5%; CBS, 5%; NBC, 4%; local newspapers, 4%; and FNC, 3%.

Across voters for both candidates, 19% said FNC was their main source, followed by CNN at 13% and Facebook at 9%, although Facebook does not produce its own news.

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Prominent online sites that do produce news did not make much of a dent in the "main source" list.

Breitbart was named by only 1% of respondents as the main source of news, as was The Huffington Post. Buzzfeed was not named by a single member of the sample. Those sites were part of the larger news diet for some of those respondents.

The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points, Pew said.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.