Young People Follow the News but Don’t Enjoy It

In other news, water wet, sky blue.

The Associated Press published an article today that reported on the results of a survey that found “young people follow news, but without much joy.” It talked about how the majority of those ages 16–40 (79% to be precise) follow the news daily. However, only 32% enjoy following the news, which is a decrease from seven years ago when 53% of millennials said that they enjoyed it.

Gee, I wonder the f*ck why?

Back in the halcyon days of 2015, I actively followed the news daily. I listened to NPR for my news — old fogie that I am, I still listened to the radio in the car, even. At the time, there was a lot of stuff going on in the world. Islamic terrorism still dominated the news cycles, the conflict in Ukraine was still fairly fresh, NASA did a flyby of Pluto, and the Paris Climate Change Conference was held.

Oh yeah, and we had a president who was a functional adult who wasn’t constantly threatening the state of world peace with daily 2 a.m. tweets.

Obviously, a lot has changed since then. Donald Trump upended American politics, bringing in a time of hardcore division and conflict between Republicans, who transformed into fascist bootlickers, and pretty much anyone who thinks democracy is a good thing. Terrorism changed from an Islamic-focused thing that happened overseas to a white nationalist thing that happened in America, and racism became a thing that people did publically and proudly again.

Guardrails that kept the president from becoming a dictator were systematically stripped away to pave the way for King Trump to take power, and only a global pandemic and a groundswell of people with half a brain elected someone who had any respect for democracy. Not that it stopped Trump from rallying an insurrection to forcibly seize power or continue to foment the start of a violent rebellion among his followers or anything.

Along the way, world peace was threatened about a dozen times, efforts to combat climate change were set back in a huge way, and the 1% benefitted from massive tax cuts and support from the Trumpists. Income inequality is the worst it’s been in a long, long time, America is on the brink of becoming an ethno-fascist theocracy, and the planet may not be habitable in a hundred years.

Obama was a good but deeply disappointing president, and while Biden is the boring old white guy that we need right now, it shouldn’t have been this way. We should’ve had some level of decency and calm in the seat of power, not an unhinged maniac hell-bent on becoming a dictator.

Instead of that, the world has plunged into a hell of our own creation as Republicans lie, cheat, and steal to grab power over a populace that they have systematically bullied into poverty. From gerrymandering to trickle-down economics, everything they’ve done has been to further a backward, regressive agenda to ensure that white men with money will always have power over everyone else in this country.

My generation, the millennial generation, pushed Obama into the presidency on a hope and a prayer that things would change. We watched as George W. Bush dragged us into two wars that we didn’t want while pushing tax cuts for the wealthy and didn’t want more of that. Obama was supposed to be the change that we needed.

Instead, we got a passive pushover who couldn’t manage to get more than a handful of things done. I believe that he wanted to do more, and the Republican opposition stopped him at every opportunity, but he mostly just sat there and took it. He had to walk a fine line — as the first black president, he couldn’t appear to be too much of a bully lest he offends middle America. However, he could’ve and should’ve been more forceful in getting his agenda passed. He never really had much of a chance, honestly.

So now, seven years later, we have this poll conducted by AP and co-authored by Captain Obvious that says that we young folks actually do follow the news but hate every second of it. This particular quote makes me simultaneously laugh and cry:

“They are more engaged in more ways than people give them credit for,” said Michael Bolden, CEO and executive director of the American Press Institute.

Of course the f*ck we are, boomers have been in the driver’s seat since we were small, refuse to give it up, and along the way they’ve demolished any chance we had at a decent life. All we’ve really been able to do is watch it happen for so long that it’s become the train wreck that we can’t stop watching, except we’re all in the burning train.

There were a bunch of other fun stats about young people’s news consumption — most get their news from social media, but 45% get some news from traditional sources like TV or radio. Additionally, a quarter pay for a news service and a similar percentage have donated to a news service. As a past NPR donor, I fall in the latter camp.

Also, in addition to fewer young people enjoying the news, fewer young people enjoy talking to friends or family about the news. Also, nine in 10 consider misinformation in news a problem, and six in 10 say it’s a major problem. Considering that so many of our parents, aunts, and uncles are rabid Fox News-watching, Trump-supporting septuagenarians, I can’t begin to imagine why we would feel that way.

(That was sarcasm, by the way.)

Like, guys, the racist uncle at Thanksgiving is a stereotype for a reason — if you’re a millennial or Gen Z, you’ve got at least one. Try to bring up politics and you get mocked for being “woke” or talked down to by a boomer who dropped out of high school at 14 to work in the same factory for 50 years. Besides, uncle Carl took Ivermectin when he got COVID that one time and he turned out okay, so it’s obviously the media trying to block us from the truth!

Like, yeah, factory jobs were great back in the day and could support your family, but because you spent decades voting for people who weakened the unions that supported those jobs, they’re not what they used to be. But please, tell me more about what Tucker Carlson said about the underground baby-eating liberals last night.

Also interesting is how much news we get from social media. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram were the top three social media sources for us youngsters, but TikTok came in fourth with a solid 54% getting at least some news from there.

As someone who gets news from a variety of places including TikTok, I totally get it. Many people report on under-reported news stories there, such as Under the Desk News (a personal favorite of mine). Others mix their activism with news reporting, seeking justice for people who are harassed by white supremacists and assorted other right-wing wackos. I am also a fan of Philip DeFranco on YouTube, and sometimes the first place I hear about a story is from Facebook, where I follow a few political pages (or sometimes just hear about it from friends).

Finally, when asked who is to blame for the spread of misinformation, we youngsters pointed to social media companies and users, politicians, and the media equally. I couldn’t agree more. First off, social media is designed to make money off of our clicks, and spreading misinformation and right-wing outrage gets lots of clicks. It is incredibly easy to rake in that ad revenue when it’s in front of someone like Joe Rogan, and it’s incredibly easy to fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracies when the algorithms feed you more of it after every watch.

The media is incredibly good at reporting on only the most attention-grabbing things in the spirit of being “newsworthy.” As such, when Trump says or does anything outlandish, it makes headlines immediately despite being absolutely bonkers, which only amplifies his nonsense rhetoric. The 24-hour news cycle was one of the worst inventions of the past hundred years in my opinion, as in order to fill an otherwise slow news day, they report on anything. On top of that, a fantastic way to get your name in the news is to shoot up a school, your workplace, or pretty much anywhere, since every major outlet will publish your name and face immediately.

Politicians, particularly the right wing but also all of them, benefit from the spread of misinformation as well and are highly responsible for pushing it. The term “fake news” is a Trumpism that gained so much traction that it’s basically a meme at this point. It’s cruelly ironic that Trump claimed so much of the reporting on him was “fake news” when he is responsible for so many lies and conspiracies that political fact-checkers had to reinvent their jobs to keep up.

The right-wing has continued the hard-and-fast fake news and conspiracy train going full-speed ahead as a means of keeping us confused and misinformed, as it keeps the base angry. Their politicians are saying ridiculous stuff and literally burning books to keep up the rallying cry against political correctness and “wokeism.” Of course, Fox News, One America, and all the other little alt-right outlets keep feeding that base a steady stream of outrage.

So yes, we hate following the news, but we do it to see what’s burning in the world today (sometimes literally). We also need to know what our parents’ generation is up to so we can be ready to protest whatever stupid injustices they’re perpetrating next. We may hate talking to our families about the news because they’re often a bunch of racist old people, but we can at least be informed about the latest racist old people’s conspiracy.

Also, I do find it incredibly bitter that this was a poll of “young people” when, as someone who falls into that category, I am rapidly approaching middle age. The top age range of the survey was 40, which by many standards isn’t that young, but it certainly feeds the millennial bugaboo that we are seen as idiot youngsters despite being well into our careers and often considered “too old” to be having kids at this point.

At any rate, while I appreciate that this article was on the top of the AP news site this morning (yes, I have AP as one of my landing pages), it very much feels like a “yes, I thought everyone knew that” kind of piece. Apparently not, though, since it warranted several hundred words and at least one chart.

Oh well, I guess that after we apathetic millennials and the equally-if-not-more apathetic Gen X have both given up on things, maybe Gen Z will save us after all. That is, of course, if there is anything left to save after 2024. I guess I’ll keep checking the news daily so I can find out.

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For more reasons young people hate the news, consider reading these other pieces: