Our Uninformed Youth

What do young people care about? Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, how many friends they have on facebook/myspace? I don't know for sure but one thing that is certain is the Net Gen and Generation Next (age 13-25) does not care much about the news as compared to past generations. The question must be asked, is our children learning?

From Anastasia Goodstein on The HuffPo:

Teens are significantly less attentive to daily news than young adults, who in turn pay substantially less attention than older adults. The survey found, in fact, that 28 percent of teens pay almost no attention to daily news and that an additional 32 percent are casually attentive to a single source only. Taken together, 60 percent of teens can be considered basically inattentive to daily news, as compared with 48 percent of young adults and only 23 percent of older adults.

There are lots of reasons for this trend including the decline of print readership in general, nightly news and cable news attempts to reach this audience by focusing on soft news instead of on how to make real news relevant to this audience, and the increasing amount of time this generation spends online. With at least three browsers open, blogs, news aggregators and Wikipedia, teens usually encounter news when they're searching for something specific or surfing and happen to stumble upon it. Because of this, teens and young adults know a lot about stories or topics they're interested in, but not about current events in general.

Most the news industry's attempts at reaching them don't appear to have been that successful -- newspapers have have been slowly shuttering their teen oriented print editions. Newspapers will have to find ways to push their content out to where teens are grazing -- to news portals, MySpace and Facebook. CNN has elevated Anderson Cooper to its most visible anchor position, but it seems no amount of chatty banter about photos of the ugliest dog is attracting a dedicated young audience -- the continuous loop of Viagra ads proves this. When MTV does tackle real issues in its docs or election coverage, it does a great job, but it only makes up a sliver of the network's core programming, which is shows like My Super Sweet 16 and Jackass.

So the problem is multi-faceted, as many complex problems in society are. First of all, there is so much content out there that is focused on selling products. Advertisers have gotten much slicker since the days of black and white TV. Many other shows are derivatives of older networking programming, but the difference is in the news and how much of it is shown.

News these days is terrible. Much of it is fluff to get ratings up. News used to be the unprofitable hour for networks, now it is another money-making half-hour. With the introduction and expansion of cable in the last twenty years, there is so much available with so little news, even the news channels fight for ratings share with incessant coverage of celebrities and missing white women. If there is an interest to look for information by young people, it will be hard to find on TV. The exception would be C-SPAN, but it is created for the dedicated few, not the masses.

So what to do? Programming needs to change, thats for sure. There has to be more content that can inform young minds instead of sterilizing them. But as I write that, I know its a pipe dream. Content providers will continue playing ratings wars on a downward societal spiral, fighting for the bits of brain matter that is left over after the angst of teenage life.