The kids are all right
by digby
I’ve seen lot’s of hand wringing over this Pew poll on American news habits. This one is from Alternet, via Salon:
This month, the Pew Research Journalism Project reported how Americans get their news at home. If you think it’s from the Internet, you’ll be surprised that the 38 percent of us who access news at home on a desktop or laptop spend an average of only 90 seconds a day getting news online. America’s dominant news source is television, and the disparity between heavy viewers of TV news and everyone else is as startling as the gap between the plutocrats and the people.
As for those heavy news viewers, says Pew, “There is no news junkie like a cable junkie.” A heavy local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day at home, and a heavy network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a day. But a heavy cable news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day. The gap between heavy, medium and light cable news viewers is especially stark. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that 72-minutes-of-cable-news-a-day class. But medium cable news viewers see barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day. In other words, either you live in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly, Maddow, et al, a day – or in the country that watches virtually none of them at all.
If you want to know where this is heading, consider another cheery piece of Pew research. Americans 67 to 84 years old spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading or listening to the news. Boomers (48 to 66) are close behind, at 77 minutes a day. But Gen Xers (33 to 47) spend 66 minutes, and Millennials (18 to 31) spend only 46 minutes a day. The kids are tuning out. I love it that 43 percent of “The Colbert Report” audience, and 39 percent of “The Daily Show” viewers, are 18 to 29 years old; the young audiences of those fake news shows get real news from them. But fewer than a million and a half Americans under 50 are watching them.
I hate to be the one to interrupt a good garment rending, but there is nothing unusual about this. Young people have never followed the news as closely as older people and that’s born out by the fact that “the news” used to be sponsored by Geritol and Metamucil and is now sponsored by Viagra. The audience for this stuff has always skewed old.
When you’re young you’re busy socializing, getting laid, raising kids, getting ahead and … living your life. I’ve been a news junkie as long as I can remember and yet my interest has grown constantly over the years. Now that I’m old I find that my interests have changed in a number of different ways. This is a natural thing.
What’s important is that most people’s ideological identification is formed when they’re young and it tends to stick throughout their lives. So, the fact that these millennials aren’t paying as close attention right now as their elders isn’t a tragedy. They mostly identify as progressives and will likely maintain that identity. They’ll vote along those lines and the politics of this country will be more progressive than the politics that came before as they come into power and go through the same process as the rest of us.
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