A large majority of American people are are “worn out” by news coverage, according to a new study from the Pew Research center.
“Almost seven-in-ten Americans (68 percent) feel worn out by the amount of news there is these days, compared with only three in 10 who say they like the amount of news they get,” authors Jeffrey Gottfried and Michael Barthel wrote in a description of their latest findings.
“The portion expressing feelings of information overload is in line with how Americans felt during the 2016 presidential election, when a majority expressed feelings of exhaustion from election coverage,” the authors concluded.
The results found the the feelings were even more pronounced by those who identify as Republican or right-leaning, bulging to 77 percent or more than three-quarters of the sample size. (The organization surveyed 5,035 adults over several weeks earlier this year.)
Among Democrats or left-leaning individuals, the figure shrank to a still-healthy majority of 61 percent.
News exhaustion was reported by a solid majority tracked among all races, ethnicities, age groups and and genders. The feeling tended to be more pronounced among occasional news consumers and less for those who regularly track daily developments.
According to the survey, only 17 percent of Americans say national news organizations are doing very well at keeping the public informed of the most important national stories of the day. Another 58 percent said the media do fairly well, while 24 percent said they perform not too well or not all well.
Since his election in 2016, President Donald Trump has turbo-charged the news cycle. From tweet storms to lawsuits to sexual misconduct accusations to the Russian collusion investigation, the billionaire has kept the media exploding with his trials.