Even worse, the report found that "What we found is that what [young] people mean when they say they are engaged in the news has much more of a glancing, superficial basis than anything we would have hoped. Young people seemed to think that just listening to the radio in the background was listening to the news."
And, contrary to what has become a new urban myth, these young adults are not flocking to the Internet to get their news. Miserably low as their newspaper and television news habits may be, they are nonetheless twice as likely to get their news from television than from the Internet.
When they do dabble with the news, they "pick and chose what they want [just as they do for entertainment] on their iPods, Tivos." In order to appeal to these young adults with limited news palettes, one editor quoted in the N.Y. Times story who specializes in reporting news to "young, urban professionals" (i.e. non-news readers) offers the little darlings "a short face-off with two sides of an issue. We believe it is a way of delivering content in a form like younger people are used to getting on the Internet."
Projecting all these trends and habits out into the near future -- it is not a very pretty picture. The politicians of tomorrow will be made up of well-informed former Teenage Republicans and well informed whatever their liberal counterparts are called struggling to make the great arguments of democracy to a general public that will make today's general electorate look like a nation of Oliver Wendell Holmeses.
A broadly ignorant public degrades a citizenry into a mob, and induces politicians to descend to demagogy. A fool and his vote are soon parted.
It would seem that my generation (the boomers) is the first since the rise of mass literacy to fail to pass on to our children the zest for news reading as a requisite for good citizenship.
Perhaps it is not the boomers parenting habits that are to blame. Perhaps it is induced by the good times that we have enjoyed as a nation these several decades. Perhaps it will take brutal and sustained hard times to get the news attention of our Tivoing, iPoding young urban professionals. Harrumph!
Tony Blankley
Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.
Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.
In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.
©Creators Syndicate