“The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.”

The kids are right. Some may be for the wrong reasons but mainstream media journalists right now are only propagandists for billionaires

I do not think we necessarily carry our attitudes towards news from teenage to adulthood. But it might indicate that news organizations can reach out to teens/younger gen through these same channels (developing personalities who communicate over social media).

First: hi Megan! Second: Not sure we can get a firm grip on what this data means/says w/o (1) a sense of what “harm democracy” means to the respondents; (2) w/o longitudinal data (how different is this than teens 20 years ago?) (3) some sense of whether this view deepens or changes as teens age

tl;dr, it could say we’re cooked, or it could say teens tend to distrust authority figures and trust peers, which would be less of a break than the numbers first seem

If you're talking to teens, I'd be very curious to know, specifically, what they think "the media" is. TikTok? TV? Or to they just mean whatever they have heard of in relation to the words "the" and "media" on whatever social media that they pay attention to?

I LOVE talking to teens about this. In broad strokes, most of them think of "the media" as newspapers/magazines/TV news — very institutional stuff. They typically put TikTok and content creators into a separate category, one they tend to trust more than "the media" because it's first-person.

I was once told by a teen that Tim Pool was "bigger than the New York Times" because his viewer count was larger than their subscription based. But if the media critics have a larger audience than the media, aren't they the media themselves?

Ah yes, the appearance of in-person authenticity

Part of a broader collapse in any institutional legitimacy, it seems

Yes. But also, the mid-century obsession with journalistic standards was a new innovation. It wasn't always that way. And their reasoning was largely to please advertisers as a whole. (Not individual advertisers, per se.)

I've always found it amusing that the Pulitzer prize is named after a guy that got rich on yellow journalism.

If that's the case, I think they have a very clear view of reality. Those outlets are owned and controlled by billionaires. Individuals reporting on social media and new digital outlets make the concentration of "institutional media" a non concern for their ability to become informed.

As someone who has been a working journalist, I can tell you that institutional media has also done the hard work of covering all the little things. And that required money. You can only copy someone else's work if someone else is doing the work. "The media" is a conveniently amorphous term.

I've found the most informative and useful reporting from small outlets and individuals that charge subscriptions to fund their work and people who are familiar with an area of interest sharing their experiences directly often for free but not on any sort of regular schedule if they even have

That's noble. But my observation is that a community newspaper, in its ideal form, was a public good like a public school. And if you break it up for parts to serve individuals, then people get left out. When I was working for a daily, we called it "eat your peas" journalism.

bsky.app/profile/nytp... This is why people (not just young adults) don't trust the media.

I hear you. My problem is with lumping everything into one monolithic entity called “the media” which is then represented by the NYT. We’ve been trained to do it. And the NYT deserves many of the kicks in the pants that it gets.

There’s a reason why “the freedom of the press” is guaranteed in the constitution, and it’s because the institution of a free press is a check against authoritarianism. And at the local level, it’s the person schlepping to town council meetings that most people don’t go to, so what happens there…

… gets documented and the town council spends your tax money responsibly. When it’s gone, corruption increases — studies show this. That’s money out of your pocket, because newspapers are boring. TL;DR.

I suspect that my local paper would be shuttered if it weren't for the seasonal tourism based advertising they depend on.

If you still have a local paper, you're lucky. (Although some of them admittedly do suck.)

multiple posts.

Are there more detailed results to that survey? For instance, saying reporters "add bias" doesn't indicate if they feel it's left leaning or right leaning.

here's another issue, one in particular that local bread and butter news stations are facing: our CEOs are pushing AI onto us and making us use it and in my case, our leaders said to not disclose even if it's partially AI [not as in Grammarly but as in written by AI]

Because very little true journalism exists; the mainstream is all click bait crap that doesn’t help anyone

I’d love to talk with you about your story. I work with journalism studio Long Lead. If you are interested, please reach out — john(dot)singh*at*j2comm(dot)com. Thanks!

They have parasocial relationships with influencers just like boomers did with a certain reality tv personality.

I do wonder about that teen part of the survey. I mean, maybe you were more concerned about news organizations when you were a teen. I wasn't and none of my friends were, either. I think we were pretty typical teens and I doubt teenagers have changed much in their interests.

Algorithm doing a top-notch job

Do you have same stats from the past? Not many 13-18 year olds care much about democracy I think. Doesn’t mean the media is not failing us all IMO

FWIW I’m pretty sure my only engagement with the media as a teenager was Sports Illustrated, Popular Mechanics, and occasional glances at the local paper. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything except that I am Very Old, but it’s at least possible that news-savvy teens are a fairly recent phenomenon.

I am also old and I read the newspaper starting when I was 8 (which my father found amusing). So yeah, I was odd but most of my friends at least watched the news with their parents.

This is totally reasonable, but I do think the rates of active distrust are concerning! That seems different than just being disengaged.

For sure. I just wonder what the base case is, or if such a thing can be spoken of. Also, uh, speaking from personal experience with some near-teens of my close acquaintance, it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if disengagement showed up in polls as distrust or even disgust. 😅

Okay but as a teen, if someone asked you “is it good that journalism is being destroyed” I bet you would have at least said “probably not” lmao

how much stock does this hold though? pretty sure if you asked me any of these questions when i was a teen i’d be like “that sucks i guess idk” and i literally grew up to become a reporter. like the media ecosystem isn’t really something most folks notice, in good or bad times.

Teens do grow up... What ability a social media blitz and podcasts one day???

I gotta believe they’re referring to CNN, Fox, NYT, and the like. In which case I’d say yeah, they’re cooked.

they're not talking about just TV news.

I'm impressed the teens have already figured this out

Just my two cents, but there are outlets that inject their coverage with bias, and then there are those who are so afraid of picking a side and wanting to be “unbiased” that they refuse to speak the plain truth. That and the difference between bias and outright propaganda

@greenwell.bsky.social I would submit this represents an opportunity for legacy media. The future of #journalism is independent and being where audiences are. There are teens who can master social but will want training. @thewrap.com launched a program w USC Annenberg J. School to do just this.

I hope when I'm old I say "young people are wrong and it's entirely not their fault"

Teens can smell a phony, and the whole vibe of TV news is incredibly artificial. As for print, every newspaper that has a business section without a labor section is propraganda

I mean have you seen Fox News recently? I don’t blame them

After how the media has behaved in the last 10 years its hard to blame them

I apparently should have been more explicit that my point here is 100% not to castigate teens — I devote a lot of my life to working with teens; I love teens. What this data indicates to me is that institutions are failing them, and THAT'S why we're cooked.

The kids are all right, legacy media is not

Journalists have been failing all of us with fake neutrality (both sides), gaslighting, and sanewashing. I haven't been a teen for decades, but I agree with them 100%. Most of us don't trust MSM because we've caught them lying too many times.

Do you have any stats on how this has changed over time? I wonder how much of this is a shift versus teens just not typically caring about stuff.

I agree in a broad sense but I also think folks who read this solely as “legacy media has failed teens” are missing the role of tech and social giants in undermining the business model and replacing professional journalism with addictive attention-based platforms powered by essentially free labor.

I was involved in Knight-Ridder’s 25/43 project back in the very early 1990s. We already knew all media, legacy or otherwise, was failing — or, more exactly, that society was failing our teens and 20somethings, who are now in their 40s and 50s and continuing the trend of ignoring media.

In the 1970s and 1980s, newspapers were used in classrooms. They were used to explain current events, to examine media objectivity, and to understand the world. News broadcasts were also part of the curriculum. It was expected families would subscribe to the newspaper and if they couldn’t

afford it the school would offer the newspaper and/or pay for the subscription. It was imperative that all children in elementary, junior high and high school read — or at least were aware of — the newspaper. But Reagan started a war on eduction that persists, and the Republican arsenal

far outgunned the weapons of media companies — though it was their fault, too. They were going on buying and merging sprees, wasting money, and mismanaging themselves. This is stuff I was learning about when being trained as an editor and reporter in the 1980s. We’ve known this

for decades. So the blame doesn’t rest ENTIRELY on the shoulders of media, and especially not on reporters’ and editors’, rather on the world as a whole — a government that disdained the media beginning in the 1970s, oblivious media owners, and parents and schools that devalued news media.

Now exacerbated by tech companies that have a vested interest in distracting youth (and all ages, really) with “content” that is very much not NEWS … and an administration, again, that shares those values.

Also unless I'm missing something the decline in trust is for journalists and journalism, not just "legacy media" right? So even new media that employs professional journalists are implicated here.

oh yes, entirely agree. i just couldn’t handle continuing to be screamed at by people telling me the media is bad and teens are the only smart ones lol.

I'm spitballing,b ut Ireally think it's b/c when I was a teen, the news was still considered a subject "for adults." Newspapers, mags, 60 mins, 20/20. We didn't find out about the world until we actively sought it out and then gravitated to sources we (thought) we could trust.

My 11 and 15 year old nephew/niece know way more about current events than I did at the same age, and ofc they're getting it thru social media. So the idea of the news being something serious and adult doesn't form a part of their consciousness. It's flattened out into content.

And then when whatever remnants of serious reporting are left fail, their beliefs are reaffirmed: it's all content. So why not listen to whatever news influencer they've grown up on and become inculcated to. Again, this is top of my head stuff. I could be totally wrong!

This all tracks for me, for whatever that's worth. I think it's a smart insight

But also teens are living in more diverse communities, so baked in media biases against communities of color are more obvious to them. Not to mention the corporate media’s normalization of Trump has happened in their formative years.

muting this thread now because I’m done being lectured by people who think I’m the spokesperson for institutional media (lol) or teens’ opinions don’t matter or I’m a college professor (lol!) or being snarky online is illegal!

they are growing up in a media market where Fox News is the top news outlet, so i get it

the problems are bad but their causes...their causes are very good

Teens have no idea how important journalism used to be. All they’ve seen is journalists being part of the problem

Fuck.

How can journalists help fight this trend?

If I had to grow up with Fox News on 24/7, I’d probably have felt the same way. But also are these the same teens as the skibidi toilet teens?