Tuning Out the News
Is Youth Turning Off the News Media — Or Vice Versa?
by Dan Kennedy
When Bob Zelnick was growing up in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, news was an integral part of everyday life. “I can remember as a ten-year-old or an eleven-year-old debating the fate of the Rosenbergs with friends whose parents were in a left-wing teachers’ union,” says Zelnick, a College of Communication professor and journalism department chairman and a former world-traveling correspondent for ABC News. “From the earliest days of my consciousness I can remember my parents and others talking about the progress of the war, the progress of the Roosevelt administration. There was a consciousness of public policy and its direct relevance to the lives of people. There was never any question about whether these things affected me.”
Times change. When Zelnick began teaching at Boston University in 1998, he gave his students weekly current-events quizzes, based on what was in the Boston Globe and the New York Times — and was astounded at how little his students knew. “It wasn’t until the end of the semester, when I said their grades were really going to be affected by this, that they started to read the newspapers,” he says. And these were journalism students.
How does Zelnick account for the gap between the intense interest in news of his own childhood and what he sees in young people today? “I think it’s a product of affluence,” he replies, ticking off such factors as more distractions, a culture suffused with entertainment, a post–Cold War easing of fears about nuclear annihilation, and a concomitant belief that government — the principal subject of journalism — is not particularly relevant to their lives.
This disconnect between young people and the news is the subject of a new book by David T. Z. Mindich, a former CNN assignment editor who now chairs the journalism and mass communication department at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News documents the decline in news consciousness among young people. A few telling facts that Mindich dug up: between 1972 and 2002, the proportion of those between eighteen and twenty-two who said they read a newspaper every day fell from 46 percent to about 21 percent. Among those thirty-three to thirty-seven, daily readership dropped during that same period from more than 74 percent to about 35 percent. Nor, he argues, are young people today getting much in the way of news from other media. The audiences of network newscasts, cable news channels, and National Public Radio are primarily middle-aged and older. And although young people spend mind-boggling amounts of time on the Internet, Mindich presents evidence that they are far more likely to be looking at entertainment, sports, or dating sites than catching up on the news.
“The main change may be that while the entertainment culture has grown, the social need for news has shrunk,” Mindich writes. “Demographers have made a lot of how the latest generations begin careers and marriage later than their elders did. Perhaps this prolonged adolescence can help to permanently deprive people of picking up the news habit by pushing them away from the conversations and responsibilities that would make them inclined to follow the news. By the time many of them have entered the world of adult responsibilities, they are past the age at which news habits are usually formed.”
Mindich paints a bleak picture. Even some of the more politically engaged young people he interviews are amazingly ill-informed. They justify their ignorance by saying that they can’t trust the corporate media, even as they hold weekly parties to watch Survivor — owned by the megacorporation Viacom — because, as one woman puts it, the show “is real, without filters.” Such attitudes lead Mindich to wonder how self-government can prosper if a large percentage of citizens have little idea of what’s going on in the world, the country, or even their community.
It’s a Start
Deirdre Fulton (COM’04) is something of a news junkie. She reads the Boston Globe, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly, and checks in on Web sites and blogs such as AndrewSullivan.com and Wonkette.com. She doesn’t like television news, although sometimes she’ll watch Hannity & Colmes, on the Fox News Channel, “just to watch them yell.” But rather than drawing her closer to her peers, Fulton finds that her news habit sets her apart.
“It definitely shocks me when people my age don’t know what’s going on,” says Fulton, who is assistant to the editor of the Boston Phoenix. “I enjoy talking about politics, so when people don’t know who I’m talking about or what I’m talking about, it can be difficult. It’s not like I claim to know even half what lots of other people know, but I know where to look to find things that interest me.”
But Fulton doesn’t see the problem as unsolvable. Rather, she thinks the key to engaging young people in what we traditionally regard as hard news — that is, politics, government, economics, foreign affairs, and the like — is to hook them via the entertainment media they are already addicted to, and then show them why it’s important, why they need to know more. “Everybody was talking about Fahrenheit 9/11 when it came out,” she says. “It was really accessible. You sit there for two hours and you come away with a better understanding of a really complex issue.” Of course, Fahrenheit 9/11 is more a political statement by director and star Michael Moore than an even-handed assessment of the war in Iraq. Nevertheless, Fulton says, it’s a start: “The hope would be that it would interest somebody to the degree that they would check it out more.”
She makes a similar case for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “It’s funny and it’s sarcastic, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously,” she says. “It just puts the news in a light that is obviously not the real story, but that people can understand.” And she has an intriguing suggestion for Comedy Central to help young people bridge the gap between satire and reality: put on its Web site links to the most important news stories that The Daily Show mentions.
It is perhaps significant that a young journalist such as Fulton would cite Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Daily Show. To be sure, neither is an example of so-called objective journalism. But it’s also important to recognize that neither Michael Moore nor Jon Stewart panders or talks down to his predominantly young audiences. Such intelligent but nontraditional approaches to the news may well ultimately prove more effective than the experiments that the mainstream media have tried. Many daily newspapers, for instance, are attempting to stem declining circulation by offering shorter, softer stories, more color, and coverage of such not-particularly-vital areas as celebrity sightings and personal health.
Room Temperature IQs
The nadir of this trend is the giveaway — a free daily tabloid, generally handed out to subway riders, chock-full of disjointed stories, sometimes no longer than one or two brief paragraphs. Boston has such a paper — the Metro, part of an international chain. But in some other cities, the traditional daily newspapers themselves have launched dumbed-down tabs. In Chicago, not only do the Tribune and the Sun-Times compete, but so do their room-temperature-IQ progeny, the RedEye and the Red Streak, respectively. The Washington Post, one of the country’s finest newspapers, puts out a free daily tab called the Express that’s light on news, heavy on entertainment. Thomas Edsall (CAS’66), a Post staff reporter, says he’s “ambivalent about the Express. In many ways, it does seem to pander to a lightweight reader. If, however, it leads to nonreaders becoming readers, then it is achieving a positive gain, both for the paper and for society at large.”
Mark Jurkowitz (COM’75), who covers the media for the Boston Globe, calls such papers “the CliffsNotes version of the news.” He believes that young people haven’t developed the news habit to the same degree as earlier generations largely because of technological change: it used to be that you had to page through a newspaper, or sit through a newscast, to find out what you wanted to know, thus being exposed to a wide variety of stories — as well as to the notion of paying attention for a while. Today, he observes, you can catch brief snippets of dozens of stories by spending just a few minutes watching the crawl on CNN, or glancing at a news Web site.
Still, Jurkowitz doesn’t believe that surrendering to shorter attention spans is the long-term solution. Rather, he thinks that if the news media are serious about attracting and keeping a younger audience, they need to draw youth into their coverage more comprehensively. “There really has to be some thorough thinking about how their world can be reflected,” he says. “That’s a very difficult thing to do. You have to integrate it into your coverage — not in a tokenistic way, but in a real and effective way. Then you might have a shot.”
Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be
Of course, it’s always possible that things are not as bad as they seem — and also that things weren’t all that great back in what today we think of as the golden age of news. Mindich himself concedes in Tuned Out, “In the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, a poll revealed that only 55 percent of Americans knew that East Germany was a communist country.” Conversely, young people today may be tapping into the news in greater numbers, and with greater intensity, than the statistics cited by Mindich would suggest.
For instance, The State of the News Media 2004, a report by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, shows that between 80 million and 105 million Americans get at least some news from the Internet. Even more encouraging, in 2002, the latest year for which data are available, well over half of Internet users between the ages of eighteen and forty-four visited news sites during a typical week — spending between 120 and 140 minutes weekly reading news online.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says the Internet is just one of three types of news outlets — the others are ethnic media and alternative weekly newspapers — that are not only growing, but also attracting substantial numbers of young people. “The notion that somehow you have this mass of people who are GameBoy-playing, Napster-downloading narcissists is just an oversimplification,” Rosenstiel says. “But they have different attitudes about what they expect from the media. They want to get access to what they want when they want it, at their convenience. They’re very pro-active. They’re not going to sit for thirty minutes and watch Walter Cronkite or his successors tell them the news and at the end of that newscast tell them, ‘That’s the way it is.’”
There is some evidence, too, that the September 11 terrorist attacks, and especially youthful opposition to the subsequent war in Iraq, have contributed to what Zelnick calls “a modest but perceptible increase” in news interest. Kevin Merida (COM’79) is an associate editor at the Washington Post. “I don’t think the kids do not care about the war in Iraq,” he says. “I do not agree with that at all. I know a lot of kids who are outraged at the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. I think they plug in to big news events — I really do. I just think the traditional ways of reaching them may not be effective. The Washington Post and the New York Times may not be the place for them to get that information.”
COM Associate Dean Tobe Berkovitz knows plenty of students who do follow the news — and he sees it as part of his job to prod those who don’t. More than anything, Berkovitz laments the dumbing-down of the news, believing newspapers and other media will have more success attracting and keeping customers if they give people what they need, and not just what they think they want. “I think you have to offer them hard news and stick with it during those years in the desert when your circulation and ratings are low. And hope that quality will win out,” he says. “Does anybody have the guts and the dollars to hang tough for a long time? I believe that in the long run, you have to put your faith in the American people.”
Linda Killian (COM’80, CAS’80), director of the Boston University Washington Journalism Center, agrees with Berkovitz — and worries that the trend toward corporate media consolidation makes it increasingly difficult for the news media to offer depth rather than focus exclusively on the bottom line. “I don’t know what the American people want, and maybe quality isn’t it,” Killian says. “But I would argue that the media should give people quality and substantive reporting, and not fluff. And I would argue that a big pressure on journalism has been the media acquisitions and the mergers of so many media outlets over the past decade.”
We should understand, by certain key measures, that young people are disengaged from the news as never before — but that the success of phenomena as disparate as Fahrenheit 9/11, The Daily Show, and the Internet is evidence that critical as the situation may be, it is not hopeless.
“I think that kids care about the world around them,” Merida says. “I just don’t think that they’re traditional news consumers. I don’t see anything all that disturbing about that. Our world is evolving, so we have to figure out how to change. The traditional news disseminators have to figure out how to change. That’s our responsibility.”
