With Facebook, blogs, and fake news, teens reject journalistic “objectivity

This article examines the news behaviors and attitudes of teenagers, an understudied demographic in the research on youth and news media. Based on interviews with 61 racially diverse high school students, it discusses how adolescents become informed about current events and why they prefer certain news formats to others. The results reveal changing ways news information is being accessed, new attitudes about what it means to be informed, and a youth preference for opinionated rather than objective news. This does not indicate that young people disregard the basic ideals of professional journalism but, rather, that they desire more authentic renderings of them. Keywords youth and news, Facebook, fake news, objectivity, civic engagement Most people under 30 do not subscribe to newspapers or habitually tune in to TV and radio newscasts. Some scholars interpret these trends as indications that today’s youth are not interested in news and are less civic-minded than prior generations (Jones, 2008; Mindich, 2005; Patterson, 2007; Quigley, 1999). Others contend that waning consumption of traditional news media does not necessarily mean youth are disinter