“You will scream into the void. You’re going to be useless’: 21-year-old aspiring journalist reveals Gen Z’s hatred and apathy towards the media
Student Cat Murphy has wanted to become a journalist since she was 11 years old. Many of his friends don’t understand why.
When they pay attention to the news – if they do at all – they hear a cacophony of voices. They don’t know who to believe. Journalists are biased. They make mistakes. Besides, why tie your future to a dying industry?
“There’s a lot of comments: ‘Oh, good for you. Look what you’re getting yourself into. You’re going to scream into the void. You’re going to be useless,'” said Murphy, a 21-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland’s journalism school.
She is not discouraged. And it’s also why she’s not surprised by the findings of a study this fall that documented negative attitudes toward the news media among Americans ages 13 to 18. The press rarely scores well in surveys of adults, but it is worrying to see the same contempt among those whose opinions about the world are still forming.
Words to Describe Today’s News Media
Asked by the News Literacy Project for one word to describe today’s news media, 84 percent of teens responded with something negative: “biased,” “crazy,” “boring,” “fake,” “bad,” “depressing,” “confusing,” “scary.”
More than half of teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behavior, such as making up details or quotes in articles, paying sources, taking visual images out of context, or doing favors for advertisers. Less than a third believe that journalists correct errors, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or cover stories in the public interest – practices ingrained in the DNA of reputable journalists.
To some extent, teenagers are mirroring the attitudes they are exposed to, especially when the most prominent politician their age has made “fake news” a mantra. Experts say few teenagers regularly follow the news or learn the purpose of journalism in school.
Journalists don’t help themselves when errors or ethical lapses make headlines. Savvy journalists or commentators, in an era of political division, make readers wonder what to believe.
“Some of this (attitude) is deserved, but a lot of it is based on misperception,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design for the Washington-based News Literacy Project.
Never get used to the news
There are ways to turn the situation around, but it will take work.
Many of Lily Ogburn’s classmates get their information from social media. Their parents didn’t watch or read the news growing up, so they didn’t pick up the habit, said Ogburn, a senior at Northwestern University’s journalism school.
Ogburn is the former editor of the popular student newspaper Daily Northwestern. The 2023 Journal’s reports of allegations of hazing and racism within the school’s football program led to the ouster of its coach. Yet she has found that some students do not understand the role of the journal; they believe it exists to protect those in power rather than hold them accountable.
She frequently had to explain what she was doing to her classmates. “There’s a lot of mistrust of journalists,” she said. But it strengthened his resolve to stay true to the profession.
“I want to be a journalist that people trust,” Ogburn said, “and I want to report information that makes people believe and trust the media.”
The news industry’s financial woes over the past two decades have emptied newsrooms and left fewer journalists on duty. In addition to not seeing much legitimate journalism, young people often don’t experience it through popular culture — unlike the previous generation, who learned in detail how Washington Post reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal in the Oscar-winning film “All the President’s Men.”
When the News Literacy Project asked the question, two-thirds of teens couldn’t think of anything when asked what movies or TV shows came to mind when they thought of journalism. Those who had answers most often cited the “Spider-Man” franchise or the film “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”. Neither depiction was particularly flattering.
After retiring as editor of Newsday, Howard Schneider helped develop the first journalism school in the State University of New York system. But instead of teaching future writers, editors or producers, he began teaching non-journalists to become consumers of information.
Now executive director of the Center for News Literacy at SUNY Stony Brook, Schneider also wasn’t surprised by the results of the recent survey.
“The negativity, the feeling that the information is biased, is just a reflection of how their parents feel,” Schneider said. “The more they are exposed to legitimate information, the more positive their attitudes become. »
He developed information literacy programs for school districts. “Students will say, ‘I get my news from YouTube,’” he said. “I say, ‘No, it’s not,'” and explain where the news is coming from and how to be discerning about what they see.
Lessons from an introductory current affairs course
That’s one of the lessons Brianne Boyack, 16, learned in her information literacy class at Brighton High School in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. She had little confidence in the information that was coming in, but learned the importance of checking sources when she sees something interesting and seeking out media outlets she finds reliable.
His classmate, Rhett MacFarlane, applied what he learned in class to investigate when a friend told him that the Louvre had been broken into in Paris.
“I learned that there is definitely fact-checking (in journalism),” MacFarlane, also 16, told the Associated Press. “You’re professionals and you have to tell the truth or you’ll be fired. I thought you did what you wanted and chose what to say on a topic.”
Yet information literacy programs in schools are relatively rare. Schools already have many subjects to cover to prepare students for the future. And remember, journalists don’t have the best reputation. It can be difficult for educators to take the risk of defending them.
“There’s an inertia here,” Schneider said, “and it’s an urgent issue.”
At the University of Maryland, Murphy said she didn’t think there was an inherent hatred toward journalists among her classmates. “They have no experience reading journalism,” she said.
This is where she believes the journalism industry needs to try harder. One of the things she finds most frustrating about her chosen field is the resistance to change, particularly the unwillingness or inability to use social media in a meaningful way.
“There’s very little movement in the sense of going to where the people are, instead of expecting them to come to where you are,” Murphy said. “The only way to turn this around will be to do things that captivate people today, as opposed to what captivated them 20 years ago.”
