Weekly Insights
What church leaders need to know about young people and news media: a case study.
Stat of the Day:
71% of young people get their news from social media on a daily basis (API)
What it Means:
In our October Newsletter (Young People and News Media Consumption) we covered how common it was for young people to receive news alerts and information from social media outlets (Facebook, TikTok, Twitter/X, and YouTube, especially). One of our major takeaways was that young people receive news from both legacy media (the major papers and news programming) and social media.
Older generations like Gen X and Baby Boomers tend to lean much more heavily upon legacy media than social media, and receive their news through social media at significantly lower rates compared to younger generations, as might be expected.
Perception and Reality in Legacy Media: A Case Study
While political partisanship strains relationships in families and congregations around the country, there is an increasing intergenerational disconnect over how to interpret and understand current events. This disconnect is linked to the news consumption norms that characterize different age cohorts.
Nowhere is this divide more visible today than in the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine, and especially in the different perspectives younger and older Americans have on these events.
Some quick stats from a New York Times/Siena poll:
46% of people ages 18-29 reported greater sympathy for Palestinians compared to Israelis, while only about 12% of voters over 45 years-old reported the same.
45% of voters 18-29 reported that Biden was too supportive of Israel, while only 8% of voters 65 and older agreed.
55% of 18-29 year-old voters opposed further military or economic aid to Israel, while 70% of voters 65 and older supported further aid.
The trend lines in these polls followed a trajectory of increasing support and/or sympathy for Israel correlated with increasing age and the exact opposite for Palestinians, with highest levels of Palestinian support and sympathy among young people that trends downward as respondents increased in age.
One of the major drivers of this trend is the pervasive influence of bias in the news media. The Israel lobby’s influence on politics and media has long been a topic of conversation, recently raising alarm bells over the firing of a Lebanese-Australian journalist after a sustained campaign of pro-Israel lobbyists.
This bias is visible in American media too, and The Intercept recently published a report documenting the pervasive pro-Israel slant in many of the nation’s most respected newspapers. As the report details (it is worth reading in full), these outlets consistently used highly-emotive language (e.g., “massacred,” “slaughtered,” etc.) to describe the October 7th Hamas attacks in Israel, while overwhelmingly using the passive voice and non-emotive language (e.g., “killed,”) when describing the deaths of Palestinians, including the more than 10,000 children killed. Most disturbingly, perhaps, was the finding that injured or kidnapped Israelis under the age of 18 are almost universally described as “children,” but Palestinians under 18 are frequently described with technical terms like “minors” or “Palestinians under the age of 18.” These sleights of the editorial hand may seem insignificant, but they have a powerful shaping effect over the days, weeks, and months of journalism produced in the most prestigious outlets in the country. Additionally, this bias seems to reflect a longstanding policy in many American news rooms.
Perception and Reality in Social Media: Gaza Reports
On social media, however, the news landscape is a quite different story. There, people living in Gaza are able to directly upload videos about what is going on. These Palestinians are bridging a crucial information gap, as western journalists are only allowed to visit Gaza with Israeli military escorts and are not allowed to engage with Palestinians on the ground. In fact, so many Palestinians have uploaded videos and photos to social media, that most young people who are interested in hearing from people on the ground have access to seemingly endless footage, despite Israeli imposed blackouts and the systematic targeted-killing of journalists. Since young people spend an exorbitant amount of time on social media, these uploads are generating a powerful sense of compassion for the mass suffering taking place in Gaza among young people. Their witnessing of daily war crimes in Gaza (including the use of starvation as a weapon of war) will continue to shape the discourse around the crisis, whether or not these crimes are adequately or fairly reported in the legacy press.
What can the Church do?
As church leaders, we are called to be witnesses to the truth, both the truth of Christ and the truths of this world. Given the bias in the legacy media (bias that is certainly not limited to narratives around Israel/Palestine), it is important that we are willing to seek and speak the truth in our communities and in the world. As leaders, we should seek out independent media sources and intentionally cultivate a critical attitude towards corporate media. And we can do this not only for ourselves, but with our congregants also, encouraging them to go deeper and consume more critical media sources. We cannot speak the truth in love if we do not know the truth, and we cannot bridge our social and institutional divides with truthful speech when we are unknowingly consuming untruths or biased partial truths in our media diets. Though there remain major problems with social media and its approach to news curation, a more democratized media environment is certainly one worth pursuing (and one young people are already living within). Independent media and social media may even help transform our politics for the better if we let it.