YOUNG CITIZENS, AMERICAN TV NEWSCASTS
& THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Kevin G. Barnhurst & Ellen A. Wartella

Previous Research
The Study
Analysis
News Ritual
Generational Memory
Form & Content
Influences
Politics & Media
Conclusions
Works Cited

Published in the journal Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15.3 (September 1998): 279–305.

Recent survey research indicates a clear decline in the share of young adults who regularly watch television news (summarized in Buckingham, 1997). According to these statistical studies, the percentage of young citizens who view news regularly has shrunk by half since the 1960s. The change has accompanied drops among young people in the levels of political knowledge and attention to other news sources and in the share who vote in national elections.

These measures of the young adult citizen have met with two reactions, which Buckingham calls "conservative lament and postmodern celebration" (1997, p. 349). Conservatives view the abandonment of news as a threat to the informed citizenry necessary to democratic government (summarized in Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991). Postmodernists suggest that young people are merely using a wider variety of sources and adopting an ironic stance when informing themselves. Some cultural critics suggest that television news initiates young people into a national identity (Trend 1994), and empirical research shows that newspapers can demarcate a symbolic nation, where readers imagine themselves participating as citizens (Sampedro, 1996).

This study responds to Buckingham’s call for "much more systematic research" dealing with "young people’s relationships with news media and with the public sphere of political debate" (1997, p. 360). It explores young citizens’ use of television news more closely, using qualitative methods to provide richer detail and describe the subjective context for the statistical declines in the young adult audience.

In research on the media, studies of American newspaper audiences provide a close parallel to the results for television. Surveys clearly indicate that fewer young adults are becoming newspaper readers (Bogart, 1989; 1991; 1995). The percentage drop in young adults who say they read a newspaper yesterday amounts to more than half since the 1960s, somewhat higher than the drop in their news viewing. Although the declines were first noted in the 1970s, newspapers have been losing readership for a much longer period, since the 1920s (Buckingham, 1997). Qualitative research on the recent decrease (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991) suggests that young readers do not find newspapers compelling because the information they encounter there has little connection to their social worlds, and without that link they have a hard time using the newspaper to make themselves into knowledgeable participants in civic dialogue.

Young adulthood, the period immediately after entering full citizenship and acquiring the right to vote (usually defined in U.S. statistics as ages 18 to 24), has been identified in sociology as a key period for making life commitments (Erikson, 1963; Becker, 1981). However, research on the life course cautions against taking a static view. As they interact with culture, theory suggests (Mead, 1934), people follow a course of adaptation. Young adults participate in a particular moment as part of a longer historical process (the temporal and processual concepts developed by Mead are elaborated in Couch, 1984). Historians and sociologists suggest that key political experiences help to define each generation (Mannheim, 1952; Wohl, 1979; O’Donnell, 1985), and survey research indicates that at times these collective memories emerge from news media such as television (Schuman & Scott, 1989).

Studies of political socialization focus mainly on children and adolescents, not on young people of voting age. Socialization theory has given scant attention to media and "ignores the extent to which children are active participants in constructing their own social lifes and identities" (Buckingham, 1997, p. 350). However, media research suggests that, although television news provides young people with their first experiences with politics (Atkin, 1981), a continued reliance on television during the young adult years usually accompanies a lower level of knowledge about and enthusiasm toward politics (Chaffee & Yang, 1990). Upon emerging as the most widely consulted source for news, television has not proved the most effective means of informing citizens, especially the young (Robinson & Levy, 1996).

What the statistical shift away from news media means and what consequences it may bring have been the subject of considerable theoretical discussion. Some critics assert that, in the postmodern era, the sense of individual identity and belonging to large political entities has passed away entirely (Wexler, 1990) or has at least entered a new phase, reinforcing a different set of identities outside the traditional bounds of state and nation (Gibbins, 1989). These shifts require more empirical study, to reveal whether they are cause for alarm, as conservatives suggest, or for celebration. If the concept of citizenship itself is a technology of subjugation, as some commentators argue (Miller, 1993), then the changes occurring among young adults are to be welcomed. There have been a few suggestions for how the media should respond. Some commentators have proposed, for example, that news should become more entertaining (Fiske, 1992), while others suggest that news needs to include more stories about the small political entities such as schools, churches, and neighborhoods from the everyday lives of young people (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991).

To share their subjective experiences with television news, 129 undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin wrote limited life histories during early 1995. The volunteers resemble the group who wrote newspaper essays (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991): Most of them are communication majors, about three-quarters women and white. They are from middle- and upper-middle income families, with parents mostly college-educated (more than 80 percent attended at least some college) and largely employed in business and the professions (more than half of both mothers and fathers). Most of the volunteers hale from cities and towns large enough to have their own TV stations (73.0 percent), with sizable minorities from the suburbs (17.1) and from smaller towns and rural areas (9.3).

The group reports slightly different levels of media use (the mean for each measure is shown) from those of the previous newspaper study (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991). They read a newspapers less often (3.6 days a week, compared to 5.0) and watch newscasts more (4.0 mean days weekly, compared to 3.2). Only a minority (34.1 percent) report reading the student paper only, while more than half read a city paper (35.9 percent exclusively, and 17.8 along with the student paper). Some report reading no newspaper at all (7.4 percent). For television news, they watch local stations (41.9 percent), the networks (33.4), and cable (18.1, and some watch more than one outlet), and almost a sixth report watching none of these newscasts (15.5).

As their greater attention to television news suggests, this group has even more affinity to audio-visual media. They say they watch television more (more than half again as long as the newspaper group "yesterday"), but both groups listen to about the same amount of radio (51 minutes). In contrast, this group spends less time with the newspaper (16 minutes compared to 22). They do say they read more (1.2 books, compared to one, and 4.1 magazines compared to three) and also watch more movies (3.8 viewed, 2.6 rented in the preceding month). In other media use, such as recordings bought (2.1) and concerts attended (1.3), they differ little from the newspaper group.

Among the sub-populations, men use most media more heavily than women. The men read the paper more often (4.6 days "last week") than women do (3.2) and watch news more often (4.8 versus 3.8). They watch television longer (134 compared to 97 minutes "yesterday"), listen to radio longer (60 to 48) and read slightly more magazines and books. Women spend longer with magazines (13 compared to 6 minutes "yesterday") and buy fewer recordings.

Participants from suburbs and rural areas pay more attention to print and radio and less to television. They read the paper more days (4.4 "last week") and watch the news fewer days (3.3). They also watch television less (53 minutes "yesterday"). Suburbanites read newspapers the longest (22 minutes) and rural dwellers listen to the radio the longest (76).

The racial subgroups also diverge in some ways. The African Americans rate themselves among the heaviest media users. They read newspapers (4.1) and watch news the most days (5.0 "last week"). They spend the longest time with television (160 minutes "yesterday"), newspapers (25), and audio recordings (70). However, they read the fewest magazines (1.8 "last week") and see the fewest movies and concerts. Latinos track fairly consistently with whites in the group, except for book reading, for which they report the lowest number (0.4 "last month," compared to 1.4 for whites). They also see fewer movies in theaters (2.7) than do the whites (4.1). They go to the most live concerts of any group (1.5).

Women comprise just over half the U.S. population, although they represent a slightly higher share of college students (55 percent, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996). The racial mix of the volunteer group roughly matches that of college students nationally, except that this group includes more Latinos. More of the participants come from urbanized areas and fewer from rural areas (1.5) than in the general population (24.8). They also come from much more affluent families than the national average, where less than a quarter of adults have at least some college or work in managerial or professional occupations. The participants’ media use is about on par with national television viewing statistics for their age group.

As in the previous study (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991), the volunteers go well beyond a saturation sample for qualitative research ("saturation," the point at which additional life histories add particulars but do not increase the general understanding about a group, is reached somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, see Bertaux, 1981). They personify not only the young, educated, middle-class readers and viewers that media executives seek to attract but also a group essential to democratic government. From among young adults attending college will generally emerge the next generation of political leaders, activists, and members of the attentive public. They also eventually transmit their patterns of civic involvement and media use to the subsequent generation.

(Among the volunteers, a dozen essays came from adults more than 24 years old, who get parenthetical mention throughout this article. They split evenly by gender, with three-quarters of them white. Fewer of their fathers [66.7 percent] work professionally and their mothers have less education than those of the young adult group. The older participants pay less attention to most types of entertainment media, and read fewer magazines and books than the young adults, but they use news media much more heavily. They read the paper more [4.2 days "last week"] and substantially longer [27 minutes "yesterday"], and they watch news more regularly [5.0 days "last week"] and spend more time with television [115 minutes "yesterday"] and radio [111, more than double the young adults’ average]. A larger share of them read the local paper [58.3 percent] or the local and national papers [25.0], and more watch network news [25.2], local news [34.1], or both [33.2].)

To analyze the life history essays, we first read a small number (about a fifth) to identify recurring themes. By looking especially for those found in the newspaper study, we hoped to draw comparisons wherever possible. After we compiled an annotated list, a graduate student coded the essays for the presence or absence of each theme. To check reliability, we then re-coded a sub-sample (10.0 percent) of the essays. The reliability coefficients between coders ranged from high when identifying simple statements (such as whether the participant watched TV news with parents or during school, Scott’s pi .99) to adequate for general impressions (such as whether the writer seemed disdainful or skeptical of TV news, Scott’s pi .75), a reasonable range given the complexity of finding and judging themes in a length of open-ended prose.

The following analysis interweaves three threads: the qualitative reading of the essays as a group along with specific quotations from the essays (both typical and atypical), the quantitative results of coding those themes, and related responses from the questionnaires. We identify each quotation by any demographic characteristic outside the norm (that is, the writer is white and female unless indicated otherwise), as well as by frequency of news viewing (habitual viewers watched news 6 or more, regular 5 or 4, and occasional 3 or fewer days "last week").

Top

As a rule, the essays move from topic to topic with little or no transition, or they segue in TV news style. For example, an urban Latino regular viewer changes subjects like this: "Back to news at home. My father always . . ." The essay that has literary or journalistic structure — a beginning, middle, and end — is rare. The newspaper essays (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991) more often told experience as a moving and cumulative tale, in which the writer surmounted obstacles and came to some end, good or ill. The television essays refer to experience, rather than retelling it. They move almost at random and then end, usually abruptly. The narrative pattern does convey the constant and repetitive presence of newscasts in their lives. A regular viewer from a small city says, "We always have the TV on during dinner when we eat in the den."

Three quarters of the essays (75.2 percent) mention watching TV news with parents. (The older generation reports experiencing news on one TV in the living room — a spatial arrangement that the young adults say they remember changing. As a result, more of the older adults’ essays (83.3) mention watching with parents.) Almost all (92.2) the young adults describe the activity as a ritual remembered from early childhood, and a similar share (90.7) mention news watching as a constantly repeated activity during their school years. These are much higher than the share of newspaper essays describing the paper as part of family routine. African American and Asian participants mention watching with their parents in more of their essays (83.3 each), as do those from major cities (80.0), and women are close to unanimous in describing news as an early childhood ritual (95.8, compared to 86.6 for men) and as a constant during school years (92.7, to 86.6 for men). Participants from rural areas least often describe the news as a school-age constant (33.3).

(The older participants describe their early memories of news as tranquil, something entirely absent from the next generation. A regular viewer from a small-city says, "My earliest experiences with my parents watching the news are peaceful: nice family environment, dad in his recliner, mom in her rocker, and me eating chips, ice cream, or playing cards with my sister." The tame, serious quality of newscasts also gave them more frequent endorsements by the parents of the older generation [66.7 percent].)

The Pecking Order. The patterns of family activity surrounding newscasts also had a gendered aspect, although not as explicit as found in the newspaper essays (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991). The males had leisure to sit and smoke, while the mothers worked at household duties. A suburban regular viewer describes it this way: "To this day, I associate evenings during those visits with the smells of my grandmother’s good cooking and my grandfather’s pipe, and the sound of the evening news in the background."

An urban participant describes the stereotype of her father, who "would come home, sit in his chair, drink a beer, and watch television . . . news." An urban habitual viewer notes, "My stepmother did not play a very big part in this activity. She was usually cooking dinner." This role for women as the homemaker did not depend on the time of day. A suburban non-viewer says that while her "father began his 10:00 p.m. ritual of reclining on the big plaid couch and eating a bowl of Cheerios in front of the TV. My mother [was] usually doing housework or putting us to bed."

A majority of all the essays describe "parents" as the ones who chose which program to watch (71.3 percent), but of those who specify one parent, more (15.5) identify the father. This is much lower than for newspapers, where almost a quarter of essays say dads controlled the paper (24.0, see Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991)).

(The older adults recall a more pronounced separation of gender roles during childhood. Dads get mentioned more often [25 percent] choosing programs and appear dominant in the remembered scene: "He gets a beer, sits in his big chair, and no one is allowed to disturb him until it is over," writes a regular viewer from a small city.)

Outside the Home. About three quarters (78.3 percent) of the essays report watching TV news at school, but beyond the shuttle experience, newscasts had very little presence in the school life the essayists describe. Fewer than half (39.5) mention television news homework, but unlike the newspaper essays, which tell a range of specific stories, only a few TV essays even remark on what the homework entailed or describe a reaction. Only one element of TV news gets mentioned as eliciting discussions among classmates: a local restaurant review that reported which places had "roaches, bad temperature for food, slime in the ice machine, etc.," according to a suburban regular viewer.

Some participants remember role-play modeled after television news. "I would bring all my dolls and stuffed animals into the living room and," says a non-viewer from a mid-sized town, "ask them all kinds of questions, a la ‘Today.’ " This activity carries into pre-school, where an occasional viewer from a small city describes drawing "big hurricane maps up on the chalkboard and . . . playing weather forecaster." Some essays describe class projects, in which, as a small-city occasional viewer describes it, "we all dressed in blazers and ties and stacked our papers like the newscasters always did," and covered local issues. For one such segment a rural minority habitual viewer mentions "the unpopularity of cafeteria food." In general, the essays describe a positive reaction to these exercises:

When describing the first news story they recall, the newspaper essays tell very personal stories — about getting mentioned in print or getting caught up vicariously in a (usually local) event. The television news essays, by contrast, focus on a common (and, as they describe it, almost universal) event. Of the eighty-six essays that report a first recollection, a majority (77.8 percent) say the first story they remember is the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

Besides the shuttle explosion, the participants report other first stories. Some recall an earthquake or other natural disaster that frightened them as young children (7.0 percent). A few recall an election they watched on TV (4.7), usually with their parents, and the remainder recall the Gulf conflict or some other story.

(The first news stories older adults remember depend on their age and, considered together, read like a history of the twenty-year span from the early 1960s. For those now in their forties, the Kennedy assassination marks their entry into the wider world of television news.

Becoming a Viewer. Almost all the respondents say they watch news on television, 32.6 percent regularly (4 to 5 days "last week"), 27.9 percent habitually (6 or more days), and 31.7 percent occasionally (3 or fewer days). Some (7.8 percent) say they do not watch at all. The men view more regularly (4.8 days "last week" and 135 minutes "yesterday") than do the women (3.8 days, 85 minutes), and urbanites view longer (120 minutes) than do those from smaller places (rural 37, for example).

A large minority write that their parents urged them to watch (43.4 percent), something especially common to African American (66.6) and Latino (54.5) essays. Only one, by an urban male habitual viewer, says parents became "overbearing in making the point that I should watch the news," a complaint more typical of the newspaper essays.

On the questionnaire (with 1 as "strongly encouraged" and 5 as "strongly discouraged"), some minorities rate their parents support for news watching higher (2.3 for African Americans and Latinos, compared to 2.9 for whites and 3.8 for Asian Americans). Suburbanites report their parents encouraged them the least (3.0; rural dwellers the most, 2.0) and least often mention the encouragement in their essays (35 percent). One suburbanite who became a regular viewer, remarks, "I see this as a big gap in my education. The responsibility is mine, but I do wish I had been reminded more often by my parents and teachers of the importance of being informed."

Many of the participants recall no changes in the form of TV news over their lifetimes. "The news has always looked the same to me," says an urban Latina occasional viewer. "Someone is talking to you. You hear a sound bite, and you learn about all these different things going on." Fewer than a third of the essays mention any changes in the newscasts (28.7 percent), perhaps because the format of newscasts in the United States became well-established by the mid-1970s, when the participants were small children (Barnhurst & Steele 1997). One essay, by an urban habitual viewer, says he noticed after living in four different states "that wherever you go, television news takes on much the same look. . . . all over the country and in all different market sizes."

(Unlike the young, the older adults report many changes. Most began watching news in the 1960s, before the dramatic changes in format, from fifteen- to thirty-minute broadcasts, from film to video actualities, and from handmade to computerized graphics. As a result three-quarters of their essays identify changes.)

Some of the most notable differences since the 1970s involve the equipment of television, not what appears on screen, but only one young adult mentions technical change:

A few participants identify specific changes, most frequently color (12.4 percent), graphics (12.4), anchors (8.5), and sets (5.4), and those who recognize any change at all usually identify more than one of them. The change from black and white to color may refer to the switch over of their home sets, since color already became the norm in the late 1960s, but "color" may also refer to other ways the news has changed, becoming more "colorful," or as an urban male regular viewer puts it, "flashier" and "more graphic."

On the whole, however, most essays note no changes at all. Rather than regarding the news as a constructed form, most participants consider it primarily an information source. A large majority (86 percent) describe it that way. As an urban male habitual viewer says, "In all, television news is simply a source for me to get information about the world." African and Asian American essays mention this less often (both 66.6). An urban Asian American habitual viewer says TV news provides information that "anyone can learn just by watching," and a suburban Latina occasional viewer calls it "an information tool."

When they express a content preference, participants generally say they have an interest in hard news (77.5 percent). More than half list other aspects of newscasts that interest them, principally weather (38.3) and sports (25.6). Interest in these "softer" segments of news centers in suburbs and rural areas and among whites. Strong gender differences emerge. The women prefer hard news (88.4) more than do the men (51.7), and more men expressed an interest in sports (55.1) than did women (18.2).

Almost all the participants say TV news affected their moods (92.2 percent), and here some essays give the most detailed examples. An occasional viewer from a small town describes eating breakfast when the news showed "a tremendous amount of space that the plane was scattered over, and the ground was black where the plane had caught fire. It was just . . . overwhelming." The stories usually involve human suffering:

Half the essays specify the most common mood, sadness (54.3 percent). They describe this emotion most powerfully when the events involved people and places closest to their lives. One suburban habitual viewer mentions seeing "that my hometown had been devastated by a tornado" and feeling sadness until her "mother had a chance to call and tell me she was fine." A suburban non-viewer writes that while her father was in Egypt, "an overwhelming amount of grief hit me [when] I heard about a earthquake that hit Cairo."

For minorities whose roots go to other countries, news from ancestral places hits hardest. An urban Asian American occasional viewer describes crying after seeing reports of an earthquake — the people "walking through the remains of their homes," "sleeping on gymnasium floors," "in line for clean water," and grieving became "the pictures in my head — those Kobe pictures." Sadness gets reported slightly more often by women (59.3 percent) and more by Latinos (66.6) and whites (59.1) and by those raised in suburbs (65.0). By contrast only a small number report instances when TV news made them feel happy (11.6), with the share of men much higher (25.0) than women (8.8).

The next most common emotion, fear, turns up in almost half of the essays (48.8 percent). Many of the instances they describe occurred in childhood. An urban Latino regular viewer says a sniper injured a classmate who was raising the flag one morning at school. "The kid was fine, but that night I saw my school on the news and that’s when it really hit home," he writes. "I didn’t sleep one second that night." Another urban regular viewer gives this extended example:

The expressions of fear appear least often in essays from the suburbs (47.3 percent) and from small towns and rural areas (24.9). An occasional viewer writes that "being from a suburb of Dallas, I also got my fair taste of the murders, disasters, and various crimes that occurred in downtown Dallas and other poorer neighborhoods. . . . they got to be monotonous." Fear is more common in the essays by those from cities, both small (77.7) and large (56.0). A habitual viewer says his first thought about news is fear, but explains that he lived in the city, "and there was always information on thefts, murders and things." Latinos (91.6 percent) and African Americans (83.3) also describe fear more often in their essays. An urban Latina regular viewer writes, "Television news has made me feel that the world, the United States, and the community that I live in is not totally safe."

Although not many more women (52.1 percent) report feeling fearful from watching news than do men (50.0), the essays themselves have a qualitative difference in how they report the emotion. Many of the men describe fear only in childhood, when a few males noted the gender differences: "My sister would always close her eyes," says an urban occasional viewer, "The amazing thing is that she would always know when bad items were coming on the news." Women mention incidents involving fear throughout their lives and with much stronger language. A small-city regular viewer says she saw a story about apartment intruders, just before leaving to drop off an apartment lease. She writes, "I could not get out of my chair. I felt unsafe and alone." In essays written by white women from the cities (roughly seven-eighths from small cities and three-quarters from major cities), fear exudes a palpable presence, and in the essays by Latina and African American women, feeling frightened becomes a constant and overriding theme. Their experiences stand in stark relief against those of white males living in suburbia, small towns, and rural zones.

A third common emotion, anger (cited in 45.0 percent of the essays) gets mentioned by only a third of the men (35.7) but half of the women (51.6), who often express the anger they feel about all the violence in the news. Those from the safety of the suburbs report anger less often (30.0). However, the group listing anger most often is white (51.5, compared to 25.0 for Latinos and 16.6 for African Americans), and the highest levels of anger reported in the essays come from towns (71.3) and rural areas (66.6).

Any other emotions get few mentions. The most common of these, disgust, appears in a minority of essays (13.2 percent). Participants also describe such emotions as embarrassment, despair, and avarice. An urban Latina occasional viewer remembers "watching the LA riots and feeling so hopeless about the world." A small-town Asian American occasional viewer writes, "I want more. I want my kids, my Grade A husband, my picket fence and my Volvo. I want to assimilate with this white bread world. I know that television news has given me these desires."

Many more of the television essays insist that the medium had no influence on them (38.9 percent) than do the newspaper essays (14.8, see Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991), and a much higher proportion of TV essays also list influences on their moods or actions (56.6 compared to 34.7). These two expressions quite often contradict in the TV essays. Most of those who claim the medium had no influence go on to list specific influences (89.9). Like the newspaper essays, the television essays do not consider influences on moods, on knowledge, on conversation, or in some cases even on actions such as the precautions described earlier, to be real "influences," as long as the news only supplied information. Or in other words, like newspapers, newscasts supposedly just give facts, so they can exert influence neither substantially nor concretely enough to merit acknowledgment. "The news," says a small-town native American regular viewer, "has virtually no great impact on my life."

In the questionnaire, political interest and news viewing relate. Respondents "very" interested in politics also use the news media regularly (watching newscasts 4.3 and reading newspapers 3.8 days "last week"). On the other hand, those "not at all" interested in politics report using news media only occasionally (2.5 and 3.1 respectively).

On the whole, the young adults do not have strong political interest. The questionnaire shows them to be only "somewhat" interested in politics (1.8 on a three-point scale between "very" and "not at all"). Only one essay ties watching news explicitly to taking any political action, and it comes from a small-town African American who eventually became a non-viewer: "When I was 18 years old, I began to watch news about the government because I was excited about being able to vote for the first time."

Media Evaluations. This view, of the news media as politically potent, diagnoses what a few participants see as a larger problem. Overall the essays reveal a disconnect between the writers and the news on television. The distance emerges in the general mood of the life histories, a mild annoyance with the task of writing an essay linking their lives with newscasts. A few object to what they perceive as the study’s intent to find meaning in a medium that has so little to offer them. About one-third of the essays (36.4 percent) express a sort of indifference, verging on disdain, toward TV news. Men and women alike share the judgment, which has the most currency among those from suburbs (50.0).

According to published surveys, the current young adult generation has witnessed a broad decline in confidence in "the media." Gallup polls (1990) found the share of the public reporting a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in television tumbled (37 to 27 percent) from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. A general evaluation of the media reported the ratings fell further in the 1990s (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996). This statistical decline parallels what the young adults in this study describe in their life histories.

In the questionnaire, the mean rating for news media performance, just below "good" (2.2 on a four-point scale), coincides with how whites assess the overall job done by news media. African Americans (2.5) and Latinos (2.4) rate the media harsher on average, somewhat closer to "not so good."

Accuracy. When rating the performance of the media, the public responds most positively when asked about the accuracy of the news (McQuail 1992). More than half the respondents (55 percent) in a Times-Mirror poll said news organizations "get the facts straight" (34 percent rated them "inaccurate"). Young adults may respond even more positively than the general public. When we asked in the questionnaire how often the media accurately cover "the things you know a good deal about," the participants usually replied "most of the time" (67.4 percent) or "almost always" (6.2). A smaller share replied "only some of the time" (19.4) or "not too often" (3.1).

Young women as a group express skepticism (50.5 percent) more often than men (29.6). African Americans and Asians (both 60.0) and other minorities (75.0) express skepticism the most often in their essays (well above the mean, 44.2). Yet occasionally an essay would express the opposite:

This research casts doubt on the fundamental equation that Enlightenment notions supply for citizenship, in which people use the media to inform themselves and take action in the public sphere. The young adults are not using newspapers, as the earlier study showed (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991), and they do not turn instead to television news as an alternative to newspapers. Those who compare these two news sources tend not to defend newscasts. A suburban occasional viewer says she finds the newspaper easier to use "since I can read it at any time during the day." These comments can get spirited, such as those of an urban male regular viewer, who after railing against news on television, concludes: "I feel like TV news is the idiot’s answer to the best bargain around — the newspaper." Television news inspires none of this fervor. Where the newspaper essays list many advantages of newspapers, we found only one such example in the TV essays, a suburban occasional viewer who points out that newscasts require no recycling. Nor do the participants cite other media they use to inform themselves as citizens. Only one of the essays mentions the much ballyhooed computer information networks. A small-town Asian American occasional viewer says, "I usually refer to Lexis-Nexis before I do television." But that’s all. The life histories suggest that a fundamental reevaluation is in order to understand the role of the media in citizenship.

A general tone of disengagement may seem contradictory, coming from a group that on average views news regularly. Clearly, the custom of watching news does not imply a strong commitment. This may spring from the ease of viewing. It does not appear at all difficult to become a television news viewer. The family habit, much more common than found in newspapers, sweeps young people in. Two factors, temporal and social, appear to convey the television habit. The newscast comes on at a certain hour, marking the time of day (unlike the newspaper, which arrives daily but can always wait). Watching also has a social aspect, as an activity involving others (where print usually separates individuals for private reading). The ease of this social, temporal rhythm also makes for a weak commitment. Becker’s (1981) definition of commitment suggests the importance of weathering opposition, and that element comes clear when comparing the television and newspaper life histories. The newspaper elicits stories of personal knowledge and private struggle, despite barriers. Viewing newscasts does not. More of the young adults may end up watching the news (that is, fewer fail to become viewers), but the lack of any real barriers makes the commitment flimsy.

The TV essays also clarify a process of adaptation to the medium over time. Reading the essays of older adults — actually spanning more than one generation — alongside those of young adults clarifies the way news watching became part of the culture and how the practice changed from generation to generation. This insight helps lift some of the fog that surrounds change, resulting from the way, in all the essays, the routine blurs in memory through most of childhood. The life histories thus flesh out the survey studies of generations and collective memory. The custom of home news-watching appears in the older adults’ essays to have started as a peaceful family ritual, strongly encouraged by parents, especially fathers. The longer experience of older adults gives them a different perspective — seeing more changes in format but also in content. The young adults do not remember as many changes in form, but they share with the older generations a sense that a highly serious, unobtrusive activity has transformed in substance. The change gets expressed as a shift toward sensationalism, emotion, and the values of entertainment. This fast-paced, more-visual news has ample documentation in quantitative studies of news content over time (see, for example, Barnhurst & Steele, 1997).

As against those who propose that news needs to become more entertaining, the evidence here suggests that the trend to more popular forms bears some responsiblility for the rejection of television news by young people. They find much to complain about. The most disturbing stories come from urban women, who experience fear and make broad changes in their everyday behavior because of what they see in the news. The minorities also find the news distressing. The young remark very pointedly on shocking and graphic coverage, and they struggle because they also seem not to know any antidote to the concept of news as "information without content" (McLuhan 1964, 23). Yet the participants, both the young adults and the smaller group of older adults, manage to adapt to this new type of news. The older adults use strategies to tune out, becoming less emotional over what they see. They often just consider news boring. The younger adults appear to have fewer defensive strategies, and they write their essays with a spirit verging on cynicism. They apparently do not like the idea of assigning much meaning to newscasts (especially compared to the newspaper essays).

Television news does have meaning for them as a form of memory. Where the newspaper essays pivot on the struggle for adulthood, the TV essays repeatedly refer to one common event. The first news story, engraved on memory, becomes a rite of passage into the political world, marking an end of childhood innocence. Comparing the essays from several generations makes clear that the entry into adulthood in the larger society involves a communal experience, focused on a shared visual image, repeated on TV news. This underlines the importance of television in creating collective memory (a finding alluded to in survey research, Schuman & Scott 1989). The image derives its power from the response, reinforced by conversation, in which the young identify their own meaning as universally shared (in Mead’s [1934] ideal of communication). This observation corroborates the argument from critical scholars that television news helps form national identity by initiating young people into a that consciousness, and provides evidence against the assertion that individual identity and belonging to large political entities has passed away. The sense of belonging young people describe is not outside the traditional bonds but in fact reinforces the structures of state and national identity. Furthermore, their first experience does not indicate that citizenship is a technology of subjugation. Young people did not react to the Challenger explosion merely by sharing a moment of unity. Instead, they responded with anger and suspicion toward national government (just as an earlier generation did after the Kennedy assassination), and (unlike earlier generations) they also entered into criticisms of the ways television presented events.