From the issue dated October 8, 2004
OBSERVER
By DAVID T.
Z. MINDICH
It's early fall, and the cycle
has begun anew. We professors
have wrapped up our research
projects or have put them away
half-wrapped. We've updated
our syllabi and bought
dry-erase markers and
corduroy. And we have received
the annual "Mind-Set List"
from Beloit College about how
young our students are -- the
one reminding us that, because
they were born in 1986 or
thereabouts, our incoming
freshmen can't remember Reagan
or typewriters or vinyl
records. In fact, they
probably don't remember a
president before Clinton.
This fact of their youth may
be amusing, much in the same
way some of my professors must
have marveled that I couldn't
remember a president before
Lyndon B. Johnson. But a more
pertinent message would not
address their youth or their
optimism or how they continue
to keep us young with their
breathless idealism. Rather,
it would explain how the
political contract of today's
college students -- the idea
that with their political
rights comes the
responsibility to stay
informed and engaged -- has so
radically changed.
In 1972, half of all
college-age eligible voters
participated in the
presidential election; in
2000, only 32 percent did so.
The decline in voting in
midterm elections is equally
frightening: In 1974, 24
percent of eligible
18-to-24-year-olds voted; in
2002, that turnout was only 17
percent. Put another way, the
2002 figure means that for
every young person who voted,
five stayed home.
Significantly, the declines in
voting parallel the declines
in news readership, and the
two may very well be mutually
reinforcing. In 1972, 46
percent of college-age
Americans read a newspaper
every day. Today it's only 21
percent, according to research
by the Roper Center for Public
Opinion Research's General
Social Survey. Meanwhile,
during the past 10 years, the
median viewer age of CNN and
network-TV news has risen from
about 50 to about 60 years.
While many point to new media
as the best hope for
rekindling interest in news,
only 11 percent of
18-to-24-year-olds list news
as a major reason for logging
on. The Internet is a great
source of news for some, but
for most it is a great way of
avoiding the news, to be used
for e-mail, instant messages,
and other personal
information. If you don't
believe me, wander into a
computer lab on the campus and
check out what's flickering on
the screens.
However, statistics show that
the trouble often begins at
home. Many of your students
are unlikely to have discussed
politics and current events
with their families. Indeed,
today's young people are not
the first generation to tune
out -- that honor belongs to
their parents, as family
dinners in the 1940s became TV
dinners in the '70s. And
increasingly, the many TV
screens in the home encourage
isolation: In 1970, 6 percent
of all sixth graders had TV's
in their rooms; today, 77
percent do, according to
Robert D. Putnam in Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community.
And what they're watching
alone in their rooms is not
CNN.
So how are young people
learning basic political
facts? In many cases they are
not. During the presidential
primaries, a poll by the Pew
Research Center for the People
& the Press asked Americans,
"Do you happen to know which
of the presidential candidates
served as an Army general?"
While 42.3 percent of
respondents 50 and older were
able to answer correctly
(Wesley K. Clark), only 12.6
percent of the under-30 crowd
could do so.
Inspired by those trends, I
embarked on a yearlong series
of trips around the country to
interview people under 40
about their news habits. In an
attempt to find out what makes
some tune out while others
tune in, I met with college
students in Boston, Los
Angeles, and Burlington, Vt.;
20- and 30-something bankers
in Kansas City, Mo.; 20-ish
actors in LA; and junior-high
and high-school students in
New Orleans and Colchester,
Vt.
I learned several lessons,
chief among them that
entertainment has almost
completely eclipsed news on
television. In the 1960s,
because of the Federal
Communications Commission's
expectations about
television's "public interest"
role, a greater percentage of
news and public affairs was
broadcast. True, the birth of
24-hour news in the 1980s
widened our options, but with
hundreds of channels now
devoted to entertainment, news
is a smaller star in the media
universe. One of my
interviewees, a thoughtful
student at Brandeis
University, talked about the
"sense of emotional investment
and ... instant gratification"
of the sitcom Friends,
which he compared favorably
with the "detachment" of
campaign-finance reform, CNN,
and Peter Jennings.
Once we begin to judge news on
its entertainment value alone,
we lose. Yes, the news is less
entertaining than Friends, so
we need other reasons to
watch. But those reasons
-- including voter
participation, party
affiliation, and educational
expectations about following
the news -- have weakened in
the past three decades. We
need to turn the tide. But
what can we do?
Plenty. First, we must raise
our expectations for
high-school students. To offer
a model of how this might be
done, consider the fact that
while political participation
and news consumption have
declined, volunteerism is on
the rise. When I posed that
anomaly to Brandeis students,
one offered what is probably
the most plausible
explanation: Volunteerism is a
requirement for the National
Honor Society and an
expectation at many colleges.
Why not make civic knowledge a
requirement for college
admissions?
Along with the SAT, colleges
could ask for a C-SAT, a
civics portion of the
admissions test. In addition
to being able to answer
questions about the
composition of the U.S.
government and general world
knowledge (a global map test,
for example), incoming
freshmen might be asked to
identify the U.S. Speaker of
the House, which of the Koreas
is Communist, the nature of
the Human Genome Project,
which political party controls
the U.S. Senate, and whether
the United States ran a
deficit in the past fiscal
year. It wouldn't take much
effort: 10 civics-and-news
questions appended to the
standard SAT, coupled with
colleges' commitment to notice
them, could transform the news
habits of young people.
Two of the SAT II Subject
Tests, on world history and
American history, do have
civics-and-government
questions, but they were taken
by only a small subset of the
1.4 million students who took
the SAT in 2004. And while
future incremental changes in
the test might be effective
-- such as changing some of
the reading-comprehension
questions to concern news and
politics -- they wouldn't have
the same impact as a
stand-alone test on civics and
news. So while the
intellectual diversity and
political currency that are
the staples of any democracy
could not be fully measured by
a C-SAT, they could be
promoted by one. High schools
emphasize subjects that appear
in college-admissions tests;
last year, after the
announcement of the SAT's new
writing test (to be given
beginning in March 2005), many
high schools immediately
changed their writing
curricula, according to the
College Board. We demand a
civics test of every immigrant
who wants to become a U.S.
citizen; it seems more than
fitting to have American
high-school students take one,
too.
The College Board's SAT
Committee serves its 4,500
institutional members,
including high schools,
colleges, universities, and
other educational
organizations. As employees of
the member institutions, we
have the right to petition the
SAT Committee for a C-SAT
-- and we should. Altering the
SAT instrument to include a
C-SAT could make a profound
statement that we feel that
democracy needs engaged
citizens, and that this
engagement should be a
prerequiste for college
admission.
As I learned on my trips
around the country, there is
also plenty we can do with
students of even younger ages.
I met with a group of students
at a middle school in New
Orleans; those boys, all
African-Americans whose
families live below the
poverty line, were for the
most part closely engaged in
news and politics when I met
them in 2002. That may be
because of the many endeavors
of the school, including
"Focus Afghanistan," a program
that required students to
present projects on terrorism,
Islam, the Taliban, and other
issues relating to the war in
Afghanistan. Such projects can
have lasting effects: At one
point a student mentioned that
he read the The New York
Times online, and I tried
to hide my surprise (remember,
this was a poor eighth grader
from New Orleans). He'd
started reading it in sixth
grade for a class project and
had continued to do so, as did
all four of his classmates
also involved in the project.
High-school teachers and
administrators should follow
their example and require that
their school libraries
subscribe to the local
newspapers, and that all
students follow the news in
depth.
Perhaps, also, we educators
can lobby the FCC to request
that networks offer more news
for kids. We certainly won't
get the networks to join us in
this fight, but we must remind
ourselves that the airwaves
belong to the United States
and not to the programmers.
The networks simply lease the
airwaves from the government,
and we can insist, as the FCC
did until the deregulation era
of the 1980s, that
broadcasters operate in "the
public interest," mitigating
the muck and mire with
public-affairs programming and
news. When I was growing up,
my own appetite for news and
politics was whetted by a show
on CBS called In the News,
which was sandwiched between
Saturday-morning cartoons. And
we can certainly talk more
about politics in our own
classes, particularly
journalism, political science,
sociology, and history.
Yes, college students are
young -- but they will grow
up, just as we did. If the
past is any guide, following
the news and politics is a
habit that we must help them
develop when they're young, or
they will never have it at
all. Students who don't pay
attention to politics cede
their political power to their
elders and their more-involved
peers. And without political
power they are screwed. An
e-mail message about that
would be a scary one indeed.
David T. Z. Mindich is
chair of the journalism and
mass-communication department
at Saint Michael's College and
the author of Tuned Out:
Why Americans Under 40 Don't
Follow the News, just
published by Oxford University
Press.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle
Review
Volume 51, Issue 7, Page B5
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education and David T. Z. Mindich