Book Review: Tuned Out by David Mindich on Youth News

Introduction: A Provocative Premise

Simply reading the title of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News may cause a young reader's neck hairs to bristle with anger. "I am under the age of forty! I am an American! I follow the news," he or she is apt to cry, and fling the book across the room in a fit of pique. From the title page, this book is meant to provoke emotional responses as well as reasoned reflection in the heart and mind of the reader — at least, any reader under forty. The author tries to provoke such reactions with good intentions, even if his media critique is misguided in its fixation on changing media consumption habits as an all-inclusive remedy for the current problems afflicting American democracy.

Mindich's Core Argument and Statistics

The statistics David Mindich cites throughout Tuned Out are meant to be sobering as well as angering. He notes that the median viewer age of network television news is now sixty, as opposed to fifty just ten years ago. However, Mindich implies that the blame for this statistic lies with young people themselves. He valorizes the media consumption habits of an older generation — specifically the sixty-and-over "Greatest Generation" demographic, a phrase incidentally coined by a mainstream news network anchorman. The dire tone of Mindich's condemnation implies that network news is a kind of gold standard of quality, free of the reductionism or bias of other media he declaims. Mindich both criticizes network news for becoming entertainment-oriented and criticizes younger people for not watching it — a notable contradiction.

If network news were such a vital component of a citizen's education, why does Mindich remain so censorious of its inability to cover complex issues like Social Security and health care? If it is pandering to supposedly short attention spans, it is still not drawing younger viewers back.

Throughout much of the book, the author strikes a crotchety tone, asserting that younger people know less about the vital issues of the day, care less about the news, and vote less frequently than previous generations. He places the blame squarely on their media consumption habits. For instance, in 1972, half of all college-age eligible voters participated in the presidential election; in 2000, only 32% did so. In 1974, 24% of eligible 18-to-24-year-olds voted; in 2002, that turnout was only 17%. The 2002 figure suggests that for every young person who voted, five stayed home.

The Internet as a Legitimate News Source

Mindich accuses the generations under forty of threatening American democracy because they neither read newspapers nor watch television news, and thus do not feel sufficiently motivated to vote. But what of young people's other means of news consumption? The author makes a categorical assertion that the Internet does not in itself drive news use in other media, discounting the individual who is greeted daily by a headline on his or her morning computer screen much as a grandfather of ages past may have read the paper on the train to work. Mindich is most concerned with the loss of print media consumers, but for many young people, the Internet is print media — from Salon.com to online versions of conventional newspapers, to the bloggers who attended national party conventions and recorded their individual perceptions on their daily broadsheets.

Why does Mindich discount the Internet? He writes that, of the young people he surveyed, only eleven percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds listed news as a major reason for logging on. He notes dismissively that teens use the Internet for email instead. But the fact that news is not the primary reason for an individual's Internet use does not discount the ubiquity of news on all major search engines and broadband providers, nor the speed with which news — both quality and junk — is transmitted through email. How many individuals of the Greatest Generation, one might ask, bought their first television set to watch the evening news, rather than to watch I Love Lucy?

The author's discounting of the Internet is, in fact, somewhat baffling. A college student chatting with an old high school friend through instant messaging may send that friend a link to an interesting article that flashed across the screen. News may not be the prime reason for using the Internet, but the Internet is nonetheless vital for transmitting news and opinion — including dispatches from war-torn areas or disaster-affected zones where conventional media cannot penetrate. In ages past, sitting around the television watching the news served purposes beyond pure information — family togetherness, relaxation — yet that did not discount the information received.

Furthermore, the Internet provides a plurality of viewpoints that the three major networks and large city newspapers did not, and often still do not, provide. One could even draw a parallel to the plethora of newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century — all biased, slanted, and somewhat dubious in fact-checking perhaps (but then again, so is the New York Times at times) — yet also truly democratic and partisan in spirit, rather than merely toeing a mainstream ideological line.

Works Cited

Mindich, David. Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.