My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #3, July 26, 1999

BASTARDS OF YOUNG

We are the sons of no one, bastards of young.
The Replacements

The news media are running scared these days. Newspaper readership has plummeted, as has the audience for network news. Worse, the readers and viewers who remain are are mostly over 40. Journalists and editors anguish at length over why young people aren't interested in news and politics, and sponsor conferences on how to attract the more desirable younger readers, not just because without them, the news business has no future, but because they are the preferred target for advertisers -- young people have lots of disposable income and are not yet fixed in their buying habits.

Journalists and editors apparently have not looked at their own product for the answers to these questions.

If they did, they would notice that their pages are filled with a pervasive contempt for young people. Hardly a day goes by in the news business without a major story about the failings of the younger generation.

There is an ongoing series of stories about the ignorance of the young -- if there is a survey revealing that high school students can't even place the civil war in the right century, it goes on the front page. Stories about how kids can't read, can't do math are so commonplace, that we now automatically assume our teenagers do worse than kids from any other country in virtually every subject. When they actually perform better, or when their test scores go up, those stories can't get any coverage at all. Not even for a moment do the media present stories about the things kids DO know, that most adults do not.

How are young people portrayed in the news media?

• as employees who are lazy, slovenly, uncommitted to their employers, and unwilling to wear standard business clothing,
• as people with dangerous, feckless sex lives and illegitimate children,
• as drugdealers and gang members,
• as people who spray-paint graffiti on buildings and toss cement blocks off of highway overpasses,
• as kids who shoot other kids -- the larger the body count, the greater the attention.
• as "super-predators" who should be tried as adults and even executed.

Young people also show up in news stories as the hapless object of politicians' schemes for "protecting" them. There were lots of stories about the V-chip to screen out violence on television (which did nothing to screen out abusive parents or gang violence in their neighborhoods). There are stories about proposed laws to protect children against school shootings, not with some rational controls on weapons, but by posting the ten commandments in the classroom. There are stories about government protecting children's health by suing tobacco companies' for their nefarious marketing practices (though fewer stories about how state governments have used tobacco settlement money for virtually everything except children's health).

There are lots of stories about schemes to protect children from pornography, hate messages and bomb recipes on the internet by abrogating the first amendment (rather than by suggesting parents should exercise reasonable supervision over what their kids are seeing).

The news media don't generally report that politicians are curiously uninterested in protecting children against crumbling, overcowded schools, disease, and poverty -- neither politicians nor the press have dwelt much on the fact that 25% of America's children live in poverty and lack basic health care. There has been a deafening silence on the issue of what happened to poor families AFTER welfare reform, after the benefits ran out.

Journalists report on this political activity in the name of children as if it was serious. Perhaps they are hobbled by a journalistic ethic that says they must report in a neutral manner the pronouncements of congress and presidents, or maybe they are actually unaware that these are crocodile tears on a grand scale. But the consequence is that they fail to tell their readers and viewers that these are purely symbolic politics, totally empty of meaning. The news media have consistently failed to portray the real problems our young people confront, and serious solutions for them.

In fact, journalists hardly ever even notice that sometimes kids ARE the solutions. We hardly ever get to see see the kids who are cleaning up their neighborhoods, collecting canned goods for the homeless, reading to the blind, coaching and officiating in children's sports leagues, helping Habitat for Humanity build houses. There are hardly any stories about schools that work, or anti-violence programs that enlist kids themselves as peer mediators and counselors. There is no children's beat, with routine coverage of the things kids are doing -- scouting, biking, camping, dancing, doing their homework, competing in debate, putting on plays and concerts.

Another thing the media would learn if they examined their own product is that their advertisers, who want teens to buy their products, have the good sense to respect their customers. They have taken the trouble to find out what kids like and want. Why don't the news media who want kids' business take the trouble to learn this?

I ask you, what other marketing campaign would try to appeal to its target audience by telling them they are ignorant, immoral, lazy and unfit to be trusted with basic civil rights? I can't think of a single good reason for any kid to read a newspaper or watch a news program or participate in the political process. They know that the people who profess concern for them actually dislike and fear them.

The news media and our current politicians are mostly clueless middle-aged guys, doomed to the losing side of a generational war. The sad thing is, they don't even know it. They think they are protecting the young, but kids know the truth: that they are, as Dream Academy put it, "growing up under government, where to be young is to be the enemy."

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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