Don't wanna be an American idiot?
Over the past few weeks, my intermediate journalism class has been hosting different journalists as part of the Susie Gharib Distinguished Lectureship in Journalism. No matter what their field, each guest hit on an issue that seems to be on the minds of journalists across the country -- that young people are increasingly disengaged with the news.
Newspaper readership rates are under twenty percent for our age group. A lot of hopefuls believe that college students and twenty-somethings will pick up the habit later in life, but studies show that if the newspaper bug hasn't bitten by now, it probably never will.
What does this mean? Defenders of the youth's reputation say that young people get their news from the internet. This is largely true. Young people spend a lot of time in front of a computer, so it's very easy to take a quick break and head to nytimes.com or cnn.com to see what's going on in the world. However, this leads to a filtered version of the news.
As a lover of nytimes.com and a hater of inky hands and bulky pages, I was in denial of this fact for a while, but it is true. When you look at news online, you only see what you want to see. You click a section or a story, and ignore headlines that don't interest you. When you read a paper, you are forced to flip through the paper to follow the story that you are reading, and this presents you with pictures and headlines that you might never come across while reading online.
But getting news from the internet is certainly better than nothing. However, most young people don't even go that far. This means that most young people are greatly uninformed about what is going on in the world. Our parents know, and our grandparents know even better, but we're clueless. The problem seems to be that we simply don't care. As long as some people know what's going on (older generations), we feel pretty safe.
With people spending more time in college and more time living at home, experts are saying that adulthood doesn't really seem to start until people enter their thirties. This lulls today's young people into a false sense of security -- like they will always be taken care of.
But what will happen when we're all out of college and entry-level jobs and actually running this place? I wonder what it will take to make us realize that it's important to be knowledgeable and engaged. Will it happen when our kids come home with newspaper clippings from current events classes and we can't have an intelligent conversation with them? Will it happen when our leaders start making decisions we don't agree with because no one knew enough about the issues to go out and vote?
I don't want to pretend that I am especially news-savvy. It seems like my day doesn't allow time for anything more than a quick run through the front page. I think that is how most young people feel. But I am starting to realize that we need to find the time and lose the apathy. Fast.