Introduction

This presentation began with what we thought was a simple question: Given the rising tide of political apathy among young people, what lesson does news teach, particularly news produced for young people, about what it means to be a democratic citizen?

News stories, popular magazine articles, and academic studies have been pointing to indicators of this rising tide for nearly a decade. And the indicators include everything from:

• low and declining rates of voter turnout for young adults (1)
• lack of political knowledge (2)
• declining trust in government and news (3)
• declining attention to news (4)
• large numbers of young people report that for the political information they do acquire, late night talk shows such as … are regular sources for information for nearly one in four (5)
• and in our most recent presidential election, an unprecedented number of young people didn't really care about who would win (6)

This rising tide of apathy stands as a particular challenge, if not a threat, to the press in the United States. As Jan Schaffer, director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and a representative spokesperson for what has come to be called the "civic" or "public' journalism movement, put it:

The goal is to produce news that citizens need to be educated about issues and current events, to make civic decisions, to engage in civic dialogue and action - and generally to exercise their responsibilities in a democracy .

Civic journalists believe that it is possible to create news coverage that motivates people to think, and even to act, and not simply entice them to rubberneck. And, in fact, they believe it's their responsibility to do so. (7)

Against this background, the idea was to look at news produced for young people, particularly by the two major providers of video news for classroom use in the United States—Channel One and CNN Newsroom—to see what ideas of citizenship were being directly and indirectly communicated.

This focus seemed to come to us naturally as media educators and students of the media committed to media literacy as a practice fundamental to promoting and nurturing a democratic culture. And as media educators particularly concerned with the connection between the press and democracy.

Of course, as cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall reminds us, when anything begins to seem "natural", we need to start thinking about how it became "naturalized." (8)

I should also confess that our presentation has a subtext and the subtext is this: media educators concerned with news should be talking to educators concerned with citizenship who all should be talking to parents and educators concerned with the commercialization of education. News, citizenship and commercialization are deeply intertwined. To quickly illustrate the point we will show you this ad clip:

Snickers Commercial
Apple Quicktime Movie (680 KB)

Now this Snickers commercial was not shown in the schools as far as we know. Other Snickers commercials regularly appear on Channel One's newscasts for students. The point is that a certain kind of news is committed to creating a favorable environment for ads in general and this kind of ad in particular. Commercially produced news which is supposed to be, in ideal terms, about citizenship is also very much about commercialism. How we think through these three ideas is central to our presentation.
But for now, back to our question about political apathy, citizenship, and kids' news.

The Seattle WTO Protests Didn't Just Cause Trouble in Seattle

Of course the question we thought we were interested in didn't entirely come to us out of thin air, but also as we watched or participated in the protests against the WTO in Seattle in the fall of 1999.

Here was an event that seemed to have taken the news media, as well as the nation, quite by surprise. As the news media struggled to define what was taking place, a certain consensus emerged that in its own way, this series of protests and demonstrations marked the most significant social activism since the 1960's.

While one could argue with that characterization, it did become clear that a debate was being opened up, particularly as the news coverage veered from anarchist actions to AFL-CIO rallies and marches, as to what constituted responsible citizenship.
And this debate, in turn invited, if not begged, to be discussed in terms of the "crisis of political apathy" among young people which over the last decade was becoming the standard way of thinking about the connection between young people and politics.

So, returning to our initial question, "Given the rising tide of political apathy among young people, what lesson does news teach, particularly news produced for young people, about what it means to be a democratic citizen?", we were already confronted with proverbial "trouble."

Is there are rising tide of political apathy? What do we mean by political apathy? What do we mean by citizenship? Or perhaps even more unsettling, what do we mean by democracy? Because in Seattle, clearly another theme protesters were struggling to bring to national and international attention was the very concern that the WTO as an organization was replacing the rights of people with the rights of corporations. The protests in Seattle, followed by protests in Washington, D.C., followed by protests in Quebec, have continued to raise this central theme: What is the relationship between democracy and corporatism, between democracy and capitalism? Now this is a confusing question to hear in the United States, where for nearly the entire period of the Cold War, and for the decade that has followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a very strong tendency to view democracy and capitalism as deeply and mutually interdependent.

Well, these questions certainly sent us back to the drawing board.

Back at the Drawing Board: Theories of Democracy, Theories of News

We were still very much concerned with issue of citizenship, although now it appeared we would have to directly consider the meaning of citizenship. At the same time, we continued to be interested in the connection between citizenship and the news. But there seemed to be something wrong with how our idea of news was fitting into the picture.

And that something wrong seemed to be this: We had taken a certain idea of the news as a given, from which we decided to proceed. What we took as a given was the idea that the press served democracy in the following ways:

1. Standing as an institution independent of politics and government, its political independence guaranteed by the First Amendment and protected by its economic power;
2. Committed to providing the forum for public debate and discussion of issues relevant to self-governance; and to
3. Providing the necessary information to ensure that these debates are informed and rationally based.

Looking back at the WTO protests, which were in part asking the question "What is Democracy?" and looking over this list, we had to consider the possibility that there were multiple models of democracy and that these various models might imply very different notions of both news and citizenship.

So we decided to put our question about news for kids and political apathy into a larger social and historical context. We decided to trace out the contending models of democracy in the United States.

Previous | Next