Young fail test of news literacy.

Hey old timer! Concerned that the young generation does not keep up with news about government and public policy?. Do you find yourself reprising the lyrics from "Bye Bye Birdie?"

"What's the matter with kids today?."

Well, you should be worried, according to "Young People and News," a report is-sued in July by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Directed by Harvard Professor Thomas Patterson, one of the nation's leading authorities on media and politics, the study carefully surveyed three decent-sized national samples of those 31 and older (685 interviews), young adults ages 18 to 30 (613 interviews) and--rarest of all--teenagers ages 12 to 17 (503 interviews).

About a quarter (28 percent for teenagers, 24 percent for young adults) "paid almost no attention to news, whatever the source (newspaper, television, radio, Internet)." Conversely, just 11 percent of the 31-and-over segment opted out of the public sphere.

Newspapers? Like, dude, that's so nineteenth century. Just 26 percent of teenagers and 29 percent of young adults read a newspaper several times a week or more. The share--49 percent--is even disturbing for the 31-and-up segment. The press picture becomes even bleaker when one probes for depth. For those teenagers and young adults who do acknowledge looking a newspaper at least every now and then, only 30 percent say they read "quite a few news stories." The rest reply that they "just skim stories." For older adults, about half read quite a few and the other half are skimmers.

Well, maybe print is passe. Perhaps the youngsters have gone electronic. Yes--but not too much. Here are the percentage shares of teenagers and young adults, respectively, who report that they receive news stories at least several times a week by source: national television (53, 57), local television (53, 61), radio (38, 44), and the Internet (43, 38). With the exception of the Internet, those 30-and-older have shares that are 20 or more percentage points higher.

As was the case for newspapers, even those teenagers and young adults dipping into the electronic sources tend to be passive and superficial in their news consumption. They graze rather than chew. Among those indicating they used a particular source, only about 40 percent watch most of a television newscast and just about a fifth say they turned on the radio primarily to hear news. The numbers are a bit more encouraging for the Internet--about half of the young adult users say they actively seek out news there as do about one-third of the teenagers.

All this, of course, is what people say they do. One would not have to be overly cynical to assert that even these numbers overstate attentiveness to the body politic. To probe this interpretation, the study asked about recall of the previous day's top story. Since the interviewing was done methodically over a multi-week period, this allowed using 20 different top stories, six of which were "soft" news (e.g., Anna Nicole Smith's death) and 14 hard news (e.g., a 400-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average).

Among young adults, an average of 33 percent said they were aware of the hard news story and 68 percent replied they knew about the soft news item. For older adults, the corresponding percentages were 54 percent for hard news and 83 percent for soft news.

Ever vigilant, the researchers probed the depth of information among those claiming awareness. For the 400-point Dow Jones decline, for example, the follow-up question was "Do you recall whether the drop in the U.S. stock market was triggered by a drop in China's stock market or was it triggered by the slowdown in the U.S. housing market, or is this a part of the story you didn't pay attention to or are unsure about?"

For the hard news, just 39 percent of the young adults chose the correct fact. Half of older adults did so. Both did better on the soft news items: 61 percent for younger adults, 74 percent for the older ones.

Patterson contends that "it was not always this way," citing studies from the 1950s and 1960s that "the frequency and depth of Americans' exposure to television and newspaper coverage varied only marginally by age."

Those replying that they were aware of the story, were asked, "Where did you first learn of this particular news story?"

Here we do come full circle to the "Bye Bye Birdie" opening song featuring a cacophony of telephone conversations. Twenty-eight percent of the teenagers say it was second hand--they heard about it from a friend rather than learning about it from a news outlet. Just one in 33 found out through a newspaper.

Hello, Ditzy, this is Elmo. Did you hear about the stock market crash?

Terry Jones is professor of political science at UM-St. Louis