Millinneals: News Is Garbage

Young people have decided that news is trash.

In a recent national survey, University of Texas at Austin journalism professor Paula Poindexter found that millennials who were born in the 1980s and 1990s prefer to remain uninformed:

Millennials describe news as garbage, lies, one-sided, propaganda, repetitive and boring. In the future we may not have anybody consuming news. We can’t continue to ignore the problem. The older generation is dying out. Who will be the role model encouraging future generations to be informed? The news media, journalism schools and all stakeholders who care about having an informed society in the future must get involved if we are to avoid becoming a nation of news illiterates.

Poindexter added that millennials thought news organizations were failures, that they don’t depend on news to get their information, and that for a majority of them, information itself was irrelevant.

Here’s the problem: there is evidence that young people prefer to find out what’s happening in the world by eschewing investigation and instead curling up and watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which they can posit as a comedy show. It’s dangerous, because Stewart has a liberal agenda which comfortably dovetails with the agenda of the university system, and so these kids have no idea they are living in an echo chamber. And this doesn’t even begin to address the pervasive feeling that is promulgated that cynicism for institutions is a sign of higher intelligence.

Young people aren’t being taught to think critically any more. And until the basic educational system of this country is changed, we are raising a generation of robots easy to be manipulated.