The Tuned-Out Generation

By Richard Zoglin

Television and radio news floods the airwaves; major events from across the globe pop instantly onto home screens; computers and fax machines relay information in a flash. But anyone who thinks the media boom has created a nation of news junkies needs to readjust his antenna. A sobering new study titled The Age of Indifference, released last week by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, reveals that young Americans are barely paying attention. The under-30 generation, it reports, "knows less, cares less and reads newspapers less" than any generation in the past five decades.

The sharp drop in newspaper readership is the survey's most dramatic, if least startling, revelation. Only 30% of Americans under 35 said they had "read a newspaper yesterday." That compares with 67% of young people who answered the question affirmatively in a 1965 Gallup poll. More surprisingly, TV has not filled the gap: only 41% of young people said they had watched a TV newscast the day before, down from 52% in 1965.

When it comes to major news events, young people are less interested and informed than their elders. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were 20% less likely to say they had followed important news stories and 40% less likely to be able to identify a newsmaker like German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Two exceptions: they showed high interest in sports and issues that affected them directly, such as abortion.

The generation gap has widened drastically in recent years. Surveys conducted in the 1940s, '50s and '60s showed that young people were just as interested as their elders in major stories like the McCarthy hearings and the Vietnam War. But since the mid-'70s, the under-30 group has been tuning out. The result is a generation that votes less and is less critical of government and business. They are thus an "easy target of opportunity for those seeking to manipulate public opinion," the study warns.

Some news executives attribute this youthful apathy to information overload and the explosion of media options. "We had one television in the house, and we had to watch the news when Daddy came home," recalls Steve Friedman, 43, executive producer of NBC's Nightly News; today's young people "have got their own TV and their own video systems." Friedman is trying to make the NBC newscast "more relevant" to young viewers by stressing family issues and adding touches of irreverent humor. Louis Heldman, who is studying how to counteract declining readership for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, observes that people today, especially young working women, have less spare time for news. "Information needs to be delivered more efficiently," he says, "to people who are trying to get the kids dressed for school and who may spend most of their time with the paper on the seat beside them in the car stalled on the freeway."

The Times Mirror study notes that the young audience has "buoyed the popularity of the new, lighter media forms," such as People magazine and TV's A Current Affair. The survey may give news executives a further excuse to soften and glitz up their products to try to woo the young. But that means walking a tricky tightrope: in trying to make the news more appetizing, they risk turning it into something other than the news.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Nigel Holmes

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With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York