Minnesota Poll: TV is most popular source for news, but social media is rising

The way Minnesotans see the world and what they know about it is tied to their preferred source of news, with 81% of newspaper readers saying President Donald Trump has acted beyond his authority as president, and only 47% of television viewers saying the same thing, according to a new poll.

The latest Star Tribune/Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication Minnesota Poll found that the medium matters, that television is the preferred source of news for 46% of respondents, and that many Minnesotans find themselves wanting to take a break from it all.

“Sometimes it can get overwhelming with all of the bickering back and forth and back and forth,” said Connie Semmelroth, 63, a nurse practitioner from Proctor, Minn. Semmelroth said she’s tired of the “boasting” on social media and the preponderance of misleading things online.

She gets most of her news from television, including her local station, WDIO in Duluth, and either NBC or MSNBC. She’ll verify reports by checking a couple of different sources, but the rancor around news and politics drives her away. She’s mostly given up posting on Facebook because it’s become so mean-spirited.

“I don’t even want to put anything on there anymore,” she said.

The poll found Trump voters were more likely than Minnesotans who voted for Democrat Kamala Harris to prefer television (51% to 42%) and Harris voters more likely to prefer print (13% to 3%).

(Scroll to the end of this article for full results for each question. More information about the poll methodology, a demographic breakdown of the sample and a map of the poll regions can be found at startribune.com/methodology.)

The poll’s findings are based on interviews with 800 Minnesota registered voters conducted June 16-18, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Benjamin Toff, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the Hubbard School, helped draft the poll questions. The findings “suggest that how people feel (about) events is very much shaped by where they’re getting their news and information,” he said.

Analyzing the poll answers, Toff found that 80% of newspaper readers oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a court hearing, while 47% of television viewers feel the same way.

Social media, at 16%, was the second-most popular method for finding news among poll respondents.

Like Semmelroth, information security consultant John Bauer, 50, of Columbia Heights, said he’s grown weary of the news. “After Trump got elected again, I kind of detached,” he said, saying there’s more division and chaos now. Reading the news used to be a frequent habit, he said; he set up his Apple News app to deliver items from left, right and center-held views. Now he reads a story only if he’s intrigued by the headline.

Bauer said he feels manipulated by the news more than ever, and he worries about what’s being left out of news stories.

“When facts are left out, that’s just as misleading or propaganda-ish as straight-out lying,” he said.

Respondents under the age of 34 and Harris voters were slightly more likely than others to avoid the news these days, with 16% of each group saying they “often” avoid the news, according to the poll.

The four poll respondents interviewed for this story all said they feel the need to check multiple sources in today’s media landscape. Eden Valley resident Arlis Sayler, a 64-year-old former Cargill engineer, said he’s a big believer in checking sources. He told the Minnesota Poll that his preferred news source is Google or other search engines, things that allow him to do a bit of digging.

“There are so many sources that are very opinionated ... I’m trying to verify what’s really happening,” he said.

He credits his MBA training, a time when he learned how to “dig in,” he said. For a story that needs verification, he might check three news sources to see if their facts align before he’ll feel comfortable.

The use of numbers can be misleading, he said. When the COVID pandemic was at its most dangerous, he said, a story might report the percentage of people in the United States who were made seriously ill or killed by the virus and it might seem small. And yet, in plain numbers, many people died.

“You have to be careful all the way around as to what you’re reading,” he said.

The poll found that news consumption grows the closer a person lives to the urban core of the Twin Cities, with 78% of people who live in Ramsey or Hennepin counties saying they follow the news “all or most of the time.” That number falls to 67% for respondents living in the rest of the metro, and 59% for those in northern Minnesota.

Unlike many Minnesotans, Richard Maus, a retired math and physics teacher who lives in Northfield, said he’s leaning into his news reading and wishes more people had the time he has to read the news every day. His favorite source is the Washington Post, which he considers credible. He spends a couple of hours daily reading news articles online from the Post and other sources.

News websites or apps were the preferred source of news for 13% of Minnesota voters, and print publications stood at 9%.

Maus, who taught in the Robbinsdale School District for 37 years, said he’s long been a big reader; he’s written two books himself, including a memoir about surviving polio as an infant.

“I wish everybody had the chance to take in more news,” he said.

Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy Inc. interviewed 800 Minnesota registered voters between June 16 and June 18, 2025. Findings from questions about news consumption habits are below. Totals may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Details about how the poll was conducted, the demographics of the 800 respondents and a map of the Minnesota regions used in this poll can be found at startribune.com/methodology.