Changing Your "Tune"

Author David Mindich’s main goal in Tuned Out was to show how “young people have largely abandoned traditional news (Mindich, 2005).” He illustrated this through the use of surveys and “quizzes” to groups of young people and students. One of these surveys showed that many people couldn’t name the main front-runners in the 2004 Presidential Election, or that these individuals couldn’t give the name of a single Supreme Court Justice. His argument that more people were paying attention to American Idol than their country’s news and politics was a frightening thought. However, while Mindich proves his point through such examples, these same thoughts and statistics do not hold true today. It is hard to believe that something written four years ago could lose its relevance this quickly, but recent events have changed the way we look at youth involvement in politics. One of the biggest reasons for this was the 2008 Presidential Election.

Last year, we saw a remarkable change in the way people (especially young people) made a difference in the outcome of the Presidential Election. In Tuned Out, Mindich writes about America’s “thin” citizenship, and about how only 32% of Americans ages 18-24 participated in the 2000 election. (Mindich, 2005). While these statistics are alarming, the recent political events of the past year would show marked improvement in this demographic. In the article, “News Isn’t Wasted On the Young,” author David Carr writes about how the 2008 Election mobilized a young demographic in numbers that pollsters have not seen in years. In looking at the 2008 Primary Elections on “Super Tuesday,” Carr writes “turnout among that supposedly disengaged demographic aged 18 to 29 doubled in Massachusetts, tripled in Georgia, Missouri and Oklahoma and quadrupled in Tennessee (Carr, 2008).” Carr specifically singles out President Obama when he talks about how he used both profound speaking skills and “pop-culture vernacular” that struck a cord with young voters (2008). This, in turn, led to more young people tuning into news channels (i.e. CNN) and watching the political coverage. Candidates were now speaking directly to the twenty-somethings and Carr shows how young people have forcefully responded. While I think it would be unfair to criticize Mindich for not being able to see the future, the statistics from Super Tuesday (and also the Presidential Election) should give some indication that America’s youth might have deviated from the political path Mindich originally saw them headed towards. This has forced the presidents of major news stations to think about a younger demographic and what appeals to them. Even though Mindich didn’t see a politician like Barack Obama on the horizon, he did write about how success of news programs would involve a greater focus on issues and topics that were important to younger viewers. To his credit, he cites shows like “The Daily Show” and “Real Time with Bill Maher” as examples of what can happen when shows stress these types of issues.

While Mindich and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on all the political involvement, I couldn’t agree more with him when he cited education as one of the ways to get kids to “tune back in.” In the final chapter, Mindich writes about how universities should change their expectations of young people and make civic knowledge an important part of collegiate and high school curriculums. One way to do this would be to issue a civics aptitude test (the “C-SAT”) to students coming out of high school. This exam would work much like the SAT, except the exam would test for political knowledge and a student’s familiarity with regards to how the different branches of government work. For example, students would “be asked to identify the Speaker of the House, which of the two Koreas is communist…and whether the United States ran a deficit in the last fiscal year (Mindich, 2005).” While I don’t know if these are the exact questions I would deem appropriate for this exam, I believe a test like this is a necessity. He concludes this argument by stating, “We demand a civics test of everyone who wants to become a U.S. citizen; it seems fitting to have high school students take a civics, too (2005).”

Mindich gets a lot of support about a standardized test from the academic community as well. In the article “The Place of Political Learning in College,” author Anne Colby writes about how much a good foundation of political knowledge can also help in careers after graduation. In her examination of political education in universities, she finds “Learning about political institutions, issues, contexts, and practices should be an integral part of that enterprise.” Like Mindich, Colby spends time looking into the use of different exams/tests to make sure students are paying attention to politics. She suggests the exam should be similar to the CLA (Collegiate Learning Assessment) because it forces kids to take what they know about politics and write out a policy solution to the prompt given in the test (2008). This would illustrate political knowledge better than Mindich’s surveys because it allows students to give an intelligent response rather than just throwing out the name of a Supreme Court Justice they know nothing about. Colby concludes her argument by assessing “College graduates cannot make sense of their environment and their place in it if they are politically ignorant, unskilled, and lacking in a sense of civic agency (2008).” I share this belief with Colby because so much of what we learn through in politics extends to the workplace my classmates and I will be facing in the coming months.

Although we have seen a vast change in the politics of young people from the last election, some of the problems Mindich mentions still remain. The election of Barack Obama managed to mobilize a nation’s youth, but how long will the movement last? Who knows if these statistics will hold true in the next election, or if Mindich will be proven correct. Even though some of the survey methods, or pop culture analogies, can be questionable at times, his main point can not be ignored. However, I (like the authors previously mentioned) believe the antidote for “tuning out” is through education. By improving news sources (schools and news organizations alike) and the way we distribute the political message, we improve the likelihood of making politics relevant in the lives of all people.