Too Young to Care?

In the seminal John Hughes film The Breakfast Club, one of the characters admits to having a fake ID.

When asked why, he responds, "So I can vote."

Sadly it seems that this enthusiasm for civic involvement is often lost on young voters. It seems that the question of how to get younger voters out to the polls during election season has become a perennial struggle. Are we too busy? Too stressed to care? Or do we just not see how the policies that may or may not be put in place affect us?

It's funny. Students at public universities are often outraged when the state hikes tuition, or implements sweeping changes. But tax policy? Welfare? If we're not paying, why should we care?

A recent poll conducted in North Carolina by the Civitas Institute showed that younger voters were generally less able to correctly identify the governing party.

So not only are we not voting, we're undereducated. While most of the numbers in the poll are up from past years, they still are not pretty. Do we assume that because we don't know who the candidates are, we shouldn't vote?

If this is the case, it certainly points back to the laziness explanation. If it's too difficult to get clear, unbiased information about each person and policy, why should we waste our time?

In national elections, we can't avoid the information. Advertisements are everywhere and the heat of the race seems to have a polarizing effect. But in all honesty, I couldn't name the candidates in last year's gubernatorial election. Of course I remember Bev Perdue-- she's the governor, but the other guy? What was his name?

However, presidential candidates are seared into my memory: 2008, Obama and McCain, 2004, Bush and Kerry, 2000, Bush and Gore. But who ran against Easley years ago?

Why is there such a drastic difference? Are we culturally more aware of the big picture rather than the details of state and local politics? Does the media simply cover national politics more?

I have a pretty good idea that the media does give more attention to national news from the content analysis our class just worked on. But is this any excuse?

To become "good" citizens, maybe the burden should be on us. Maybe if we start to seek out information about local happenings (like many hyper-local blogs and community papers are beginning to do), mainstream media will follow.

Whatever the solution, this phenomenon of horribly low voter turnout and under-education in the younger generation must change if we are to have an engaged civic society. It's up to our generation to make change happen.

In 9th grade, I wasn't very good at biology. For this reason, the three extra credit questions that my biology teacher would write on the whiteboard at the beginning of each test were of the utmost importance to me. So when my teacher wrote the question "Who is the mayor of Raleigh?" in green dry-erase-marker on the board at the start of a test I had been particularly dreading, I, along with many of my classmates, let out a long groan. We didn't know.

I did not attend a normal school. In 9th grade, I was actually in middle school still, attending a Montessori school that was a "junior high," meaning that middle school was 7th-9th grades as opposed to 6th-8th like Durham County Public Schools. My class size was 10, and we were some of the most informed and culturally aware people our age. We had to be. We were grilled daily on current events in our Economic/Legal/Political (or ELP, not to be confused with the musical group) seminar. I was reading local, national and international news sources daily but I could not tell you the name of a prominent local official.

This narrative, apart from illustrating my distaste for science, highlights a greater issue in modern media: an outstanding lack in local coverage. Why is it that national news is given greater importance over issues that may affect citizens more directly and immediately?

Now, at 19, I had the distinct opportunity to investigate why I did not know the name of the Raleigh mayor for that crucial extra-credit question. In my journalism class, Citizens and Media, my classmates and I examined the content of six local papers across the state of North Carolina, breaking down the stories into five categories: local political news, state political news, national political news, sports, and other.

We studied 14 issues each of The Winston Salem Journal, The Greensboro News & Record, The Charlotte Observer, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Wilmington-Star News and the Fayetteville Observer. The purpose of the study was to discover just what newspaper readers in North Carolina were reading about in their local papers. We wanted to know how much political coverage and information was available to people at each level of government.

Our findings may surprise some, but my guess is that most newspaper readers will not be shocked. The combined results of all 84 papers showed 27.1% sports stories, more than all political coverage combined (22.3%), with miscellaneous stories (crime, features etc.) making up the majority of the papers (50.6%). Here are the overall numbers by category:

84 newspaper editions total

Local politics/govt stories: 336 (6.4%)

State politics/govt: 272 (5.1%)

National politics/govt: 569 (10.8%)

Sports: 1,432 (27.1%)

Other: 2,674 (50.6%)

Total articles: 5,283


The only real surprise in these numbers is perhaps that state politics and government get less coverage than local, but, let's face it, both numbers are not good. But why are these numbers so low?

Last week, Professor Towns made the assertion that local news is boring. Is that the reason? Is state news just as mundane? But what makes national so much more exciting that there would be such a significant difference in coverage?

Maybe our numbers are skewed by the time we examined papers. We looked at content during a time when the nation was on the edge of its seat watching the Health Care debate. But aren't there issues just as important that affect us as much, if not more, going on in our own state and communities?

Perhaps citizens just aren't excited about what was said at the Town Council meeting, or by their state senator in the legislative building. Are state politics just not as glamorous? Why?

Or is it that we just don't need as much coverage of state and local government in our papers? If the system is the way we want it, why change it?

These are questions that we need to examine. The content analysis was a good start-- it illustrated what many journalists have feared to be true. But now we need to investigate how much we really need state and local coverage in our newspapers, or if we are getting it from somewhere else, like blogs or Web pages.

If we want to be informed citizens come voting day, we need to know what's going on. So yes, we do need state and local news. Now we just need to figure out what's the best way to get it.