Most Teens Have Little Interest in Current Events, Newspapers, Study Says

By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 7/26/2007

If you think teens care more about iPods and instant messaging than current events, you're right. A new Harvard University study shows that most teens could care less about what goes on in the world around them and have no interest in reading the newspaper.

The study, based on a national sample of 1,800 teens (ages 12 to 17), young adults (ages 18 to 30), and older adults, found that 28 percent of teens pay almost no attention to daily news. An additional 32 percent were "casually inattentive" to news from just one source. Taken together, 60 percent of teens can be considered inattentive to daily news, as compared to 48 percent of young adults and 23 percent of older adults, says the study, released by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy.

"There's increasing evidence that young adults, relative to the young adults of 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, are less informed politically," says the study’s author Tom Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, at the Shorenstein Center. "Patterson explains that although there was always an information gap between young and older adult, the gap is more substantial now.

Despite their stated preference for Internet-based news, teens and young adults are twice as likely to get their daily news from television, tending to rely on broadcast and cable newscasts, the study says. Not surprisingly, they’re also more attuned to soft news, such as the activities of celebrities, than what’s going on in Congress.

What about newspapers? Most young adults say they simply ignore them. While one in five older adults claim to be frequent newspaper readers, only one in 12 young adults and one in 20 teens say they read it closely every day.

The significance of the findings? "There are points where knowledge is needed," says Patterson, pointing as an example to information circulating before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "Many Americans thought Iraq was involved in 9/11," Patterson says. "Young people were more likely to hold those beliefs."

Even after the media began to dispute the alleged Iraq/Al Qaida connection, "the less dependent you were on news, the more likely you were to have misperceptions of what the world is all about," Patterson says. "And the more misperceptions you had, the more supportive you were of the invasion."