Poll: Only 1 in 3 Americans find Trump's coronavirus briefings at the White House helpful

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Poll: Only 1 in 3 Americans find Trump's coronavirus briefings at the White House helpful
white house coronavirus press briefing
  • President Trump has held daily briefings with members of the White House coronavirus task force, which have increasingly become confusing as Trump contradicts his own experts on issues like the use of unapproved drugs to possibly treat COVID-19 and how long Americans will need to maintain stringent social distancing.
  • Insider polled over 1,000 U.S. adults on March 24-25 to see whether the briefings were helpful for Americans.
  • The poll found nearly 34% said they had watched the briefings but did not find them helpful. By comparison, about 32% of respondents had watched the briefings and found them helpful.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Fewer than one third of Americans think that President Donald Trump's daily coronavirus task force briefings are useful, an Insider poll found.

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Trump has held daily briefings with the administration's coronavirus task force, helmed by Vice President Mike Pence, and a rotating cast of health experts and administration officials, who provide updates about the country's progress in combating the coronavirus.

Health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration's top infectious disease expert, have been praised for delivering concise updates about how the virus is spreading and the government's efforts to identify treatments and vaccines.

But the briefings can quickly descend into chaos, as Trump contradicts his experts on matters such as not-yet-approved treatments for the coronavirus and guidance from health officials about how long Americans will need to maintain social distancing practices. The president has also used his pulpit to attack journalists and attempt to rebrand the coronavirus with the xenophobic moniker "Chinese virus."

To see how the briefings were resonating with Americans, Insider asked U.S. adults whether they had watched the White House briefings on the federal coronavirus response.

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  • Nearly 34% said they had watched the briefings but did not find them helpful.
  • 32% of respondents said they had watched the briefings and found them helpful.
  • 22% of people had not watched the briefings, but said they read about what happens in them
  • 10% did not watch them or follow the news that much.

The poll of 1,136 U.S. adults was conducted on March 24-25, 2020. The answers were collected via SurveyMonkey Audience, and had a margin of error plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95% confidence level.

The poll also found that a majority of Americans - 54% - think the government is not sufficiently prepared to handle COVID-19 cases.

Some of Trump's critics have begun to call for the networks to stop broadcasting Trump's briefing in their entirety. On Monday night, several networks cut away from Trump's scheduled briefing . In a statement to Insider, MSNBC said that they had stopped broadcasting it live because "the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health."

In a tweet, White House spokesman Judd Deere slammed the networks, including CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC for their programming decision, calling it "pretty disgraceful."

SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weigh its sample based on race or income. A total of 1,136 respondents were collected March 25, 2020, a margin of error plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95% confidence level.

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