Disengagement is No Civic Virtue

My editorial in today's Ledger-Enquirer:

The Associated Press released a story this week about the growing tendency of young adults to disengage from the news. The Pew Research Center conducted a survey in 2006 which indicated that 27 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 hadn't gotten news the day before from any source, including newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet.

In explaining their disconnect, some of the respondents spoke of weariness with the sheer volume of news that is available, lack of time, lack of interest, and disgust with the ways in which the news often focuses on the dark side of humanity.

It's true that we are the most news-saturated generation to ever live. We are surrounded by it 24 hours a day in formats and through media that our predecessors could never have imagined. And it is likewise true that there is much in the news, in both content and delivery, to elicit disgust and frustration

On the surface, it may seem self-serving for a newspaper to extol the virtue of being engaged with the news. And self-serving it would be if news were nothing more than a product packaged and sold for a profit.

However, news is much more than mere words on a page, voices in the air or pictures on a screen. What we find in today's news are the reverberations of yesterday's choices, decisions and actions. What we agonize over, debate and act upon today will bear offspring in tomorrow's headlines. And tomorrow's headlines will reveal to us if today's actions were right or wrong, and offer us another opportunity to act differently.

Amidst all of their reasonable explanations for disengaging from the news, these young adults can discover an alluring invitation to write the future chapters of our civilization, if they will look more deeply. To do this well, they must be men and women who understand the times and know what we, as a people, should do to prevent our story from becoming a tragedy.

This requires that they gain an understanding of the dynamics of life in today's world. And it necessitates that they be attentive to history, gleaning wisdom from the headlines of past generations and applying that wisdom to the unique context in which we find ourselves today.

In so doing, they can become more than mere consumers of news, but informed, intelligent makers of news with the power to guide the generations behind them.

-- Bill Huffhine, for the editorial board