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.

CNN Spurred By Michael Moore To Report On Health Care Crisis

Of course the media is too busy reporting on John Edwards hair, Paris Hilton and the latest missing white woman to spontaneously be journalists and examine the state of our health care system...for the most part. To CNN's credit, they did look at the facts about our health care crisis, but only to try and discredit Michael Moore's new documentary, SiCKO. As you can tell from the article, they are desperately trying to put holes in the accuracy of Moore's substantial work.

From CNN:

Moore covers a lot of ground. Our team investigated some of the claims put forth in his film. We found that his numbers were mostly right, but his arguments could use a little more context. As we dug deep to uncover the numbers, we found surprisingly few inaccuracies in the film. In fact, most pundits or health-care experts we spoke to spent more time on errors of omission rather than disputing the actual claims in the film.

Whether it's dollars spent, group coverage or Medicaid income cutoffs, health care goes hand in hand with numbers. Moore opens his film by giving these statistics, "Fifty million uninsured Americans ... 18,000 people die because they are uninsured."

For the most part, that's true. The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say 43.6 million, or about 15 percent of Americans, were uninsured in 2006. For the past five years, the overall count has fluctuated between 41 million and 44 million people. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 people do die each year mainly because they are less likely to receive screening and preventive care for chronic diseases.

Oh my, Moore is off by a few million people, he's obviously not qualified to report on the truth of our health care system.The piece goes on to highlight the good parts of the American system such as low wait times for elective surgery (meh) and that countries with universal health insurance can get supplemental insurance while there are planned out wait times for the basic care.

How good of CNN to finally devote some time to health care in America. Of course it is meant to attack Moore while giving him some credit for statistics they could not refute. They also agree things need to change, but that a movie won't do it. Well CNN.....it is people like Michael that are spotlighting the crisis that we face. If CNN and the rest of the media would regularly report on the greed of the HMO brass profit off of regular people's misery instead of devoting hours upon hours to Paris Hilton and her finding god in jail, maybe we could move the national debate a little faster so that we can in fact foster real change in how health care is administered to more than 300 million Americans.

Chris Dodd Has A Message For The Media

Chris Dodd is sounding better and better by the day. Although he is far behind in the polls, the leadership he is taking in regards to getting out of Iraq is highly commendable.

VA Tech To Media: Get Out Of Here!

Three cheers for the Student Government at Virginia Tech. They demanded that the news media leave the campus by this morning. In order to get back to school and try to put the tragedy behind them, they told the reporters to get out and give students the respect they deserve. Although the story is extremely newsworthy, the time has come for the cameras to disappear and for the media to move on as well. The tragedy last week was horrific to say the least but to dwell on it and obsess over every little thing that Seung-Hui Cho did is getting ridiculous.

Of course the authorities in Virginia need to finish their investigations. The legislators need to fix gun laws that allowed Cho to commit his crimes. The students need to grieve. The parents need to mourn. The traditional media needs to move on. There is too much news out there that goes unreported. It is typically the big stuff that concerns Congress, the President and of course the war in Iraq. Hundreds of people were killed in the Middle East last week and Bush's latest failed policy needs to be examined by people outside the blogosphere.