Media Book Critique Tuned Out:

Media Book Critique

Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 don't follow the news. Simply reading the title of this book may causes a young reader's neck hairs to bristle with anger. 'I am under the age of forty! I am an American! I follow the news,' he or she is apt to cry, and fling the book across the room in a fit of pique. From the title page, this book is meant to provoke emotional responses as well as reason, in the heart and mind of the reader -- at least, any reader under forty. But the author tries to provoke such anger with good intentions, even if his media critique is misguided in its fixation upon changing the media consumption habits as an all-inclusive remedy for the current problems afflicting American democracy.

The statistics David Mindich cites throughout Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 don't follow the news are meant to sobering as well as anger. He notes that the median viewer age of network television news is now sixty, as opposed to fifty ten years ago. However, Mindich's implications are that the blame for this lies statistic lies in the fault of young people. He valorizes the media consumption habits of an older generation, specifically this sixty and over 'greatest generation' demographic, a phrase incidentally coined by a mainstream news network anchorman. The dire tone of Mindich's condemnation of young people not watching the news like their grandparents do implies that network news is kind of a gold standard of quality, free of the reductionism or bias of other media the author declaims. Mindich both criticizes network news for becoming entertainment-oriented news and criticizes younger people for not watching such news.

However, if network news was such a vital component of a citizen's education, why can Mindich be so censorious of its inability to cover complex issues like social security and health care? If it is pandering to supposedly young attention spans, it is still drawing younger viewers?

Thus, throughout much of the book, the author strikes a crotchety tone, stating that younger people know less about the vital issues of the day, cares less about the news, and vote less frequently than previous generations. He puts the blame squarely on their media consumption habits. For instance, in 1972, half of all college-age eligible voters participated in the presidential election; in 2000, only 32% did so. In 1974, 24% of eligible 18-to-24-year-olds voted; in 2002, that turnout was only 17%. The 2002 figure suggests that for every young person who voted, five stayed home.

Mindich accuses the generations under forty for threatening American democracy because they don't read newspapers or even watch TV news instead, and thus do not feel sufficiently motivated to vote. But what of young person's other means of news consumption? The author makes a categorical assertion that the Internet does not in itself drive news use in other media, discounting the individual who is daily greeted by a headline on his or her morning computer screen much as his or her grandfather of ages past may have read the paper on the train to work. Mindich is most concerned with the loss of news consumers of print media but for many young people, the Internet is print media, from Salon.com to online versions of more conventional papers, to yes, even the bloggers that attended the national party conventions and recorded their individual perceptions of those events on their daily broadsheets.

Why does Mindich discount the Internet? He writes that, of the young people he surveyed, eleven percent of eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds listed the news as a major reason for logging on. He sniffs that teens use the Internet for email instead. But merely because the news is not the prime reason for an individual's Internet use does not discount the ubiquity of news on all the major search engines, Internet and Broadband providers, and the speed with which news -- both quality and junk -- is transmitted through email. How many individuals, one might query, of the greatest generation bought their first television to watch the evening news, or to watch 'I Love Lucy?'

The author's discounting of the Internet is in fact somewhat baffling. A college student talking to an old high school friend through Instant Messaging may send that friend a copy of an interesting article that flashed across the screen. News may not be prime reason for using the Internet but still the Internet is vital for transmitting news and opinion, even of dispatches from war torn areas, or disaster afflicted zones where the conventional media cannot penetrate. In ages past, sitting around the television watching the news may have had other purposes than information -- family togetherness, relaxation, as well, but that did not discount the information received.

Furthermore, the Internet provides a plurality of viewpoints that the three networks and the major city newspapers did not and often still do not provide. One could even make a parallel to the plethora of newspapers of the turn of the century, all biased and slanted and somewhat dubious in fact-checking perhaps (but then again, so is the New York Times) but also truly democratic and partisan in spirit, rather than merely toeing a mainstream party line and ideological line.

Mindich gives short shrift to the Internet perhaps because it is a medium he seems to neither know very well nor understand. It is also a medium that cannot be easily controlled and filtered, unlike conventional fact-checked newspapers and newscasts. Instead, Mindich attacks obvious targets, like the attention given to Britney Spear's midriff in the popular press as an example of how papers have 'dumbed down' the news -- as if young audiences can't read about Britney Spears and Bush's new proposed economic plan in the same sitting. Did the papers of the past not include entertainment news and 'puff pieces'? Did the papers of the past, and the newscasts of the past not also struggle between maintaining high standards and sustaining profits?

While Mindich does use concrete statistics to support his challenge that young people are not voting, he does not ask a crucial journalistic question time and time again, which is why -- why are people under forty feeling so disenfranchised from traditional news organization and media? Yes they have stopped reading, but does this connote a lack of intelligence on their part, or of the media's ability to address their concerns. If only people read newspapers more, Mindich asserts, they would vote more. True, significantly, the declines in voting parallel the declines in news readership. But although the author assumes causality, the two statistics may merely mean together that the print media is not doing enough to support a wide range of voices and opinions in the diverse under-forty demographic.