Image: Creatas

Paula Poindexter, a journalism school professor at The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication has a new book, Millennials, News, and Social Media: Is News Engagement a Thing of the Past?, that analyzes the relationship between millennials and the media. Her main finding: young people have little-to-no regard for the news. Specifically, they describe the media as “boring,” “biased,” and “garbage.” Dang!

Perhaps more importantly, her research shows that millennials don’t see the importance of being informed (though they are using their mobile devices to access news when they decide to check in).

“We can’t continue to ignore the problem. The older generation is dying out. Who will be the role model encouraging future generations to be informed?” Poindexter said in a press statement available on JimRomenesko.com, which is also collecting comments on this topic on its Facebook page.

Black millennials specifically have a negative view of the news media, and are “at least six times more likely than whites, Asians and Hispanics” to give it a failing “F” grade. She told the Maynard Institute, which is dedicated to improving diversity in newsrooms and news coverage, that young African Americans don’t think the media is concerned with reporting on their generation, and frequently depict them in a negative light.

For her book, Poindexter surveyed 1,000 adults over the age of 18. Eighteen percent were millennials, and she included participants between the ages of 13 and 17 in that group. The number of participants here seems a tad too small for us, but based on other media data we’ve looked at over the past months, it sounds pretty familiar. Diversity of all kinds needs to be enhanced across the media. Without a doubt, media organizations would see a marked improvement in the depth and breadth of their coverage if newsrooms were more reflective of the world we live in.

If you are a millennial looking for coverage geared to your generation, TechCrunch has been following the launch of #waywire, a new media platform launched and co-created by Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker (love him!) with financial backers like Oprah. That first link will take you to a video of the Mayor talking about the site.

Apparently there was a major protest this weekend, but unless you happened to be in the vicinity or walking past it, you probably haven’t heard much about it.

This past Saturday, anywhere between a few hundreds to as many as 5,000 protesters (depending on the source) flooded into Manhattan for Occupation Wall Street, a multi-day rally, which seeks to peacefully “occupy Wall Street” and expose the disloyal, incompetent, and corrupt special interests, which have permeated our economy and government.

Inspired by the massive public protests in Cairo and in Madrid, these protestors organized online, mostly through social networking sites, with a little help from the activist hacker group Anonymous.  For the past three days, the protestors slept in sleeping bags in a park near Wall Street at night and held demonstrations in the morning. Today will mark the fourth day of the “occupation” where hundreds still remain beating drums, waving signs and chanting slogans such as “Wall Street is our Street.” Yet the three major cable news networks have devoted little to no airtime on this developing story.

Of course, you can watch the protest live online or you can read all about the details in alternative newspapers and online news sites.  However, the mainstream media, which reports daily on the happenings inside of Wall Street have seemed to bypass all the action happening outside on the streets of the financial district.  I mean when the youth in Eygpt and Tunisia decided to stand up and say they had enough, our media was there with round the clock coverage. So what’s up with that?

Perhaps there is a logical explanation on why the mainstream press, particularly the 24 hour news stations have chosen to ignore the protest – especially at a time when animosity for the Wall Street has reached fever pitch. Maybe the numbers weren’t big enough to warrant coverage? However, similar and yet sparsely attended Tea Party rallies in Washington, D.C, which were held in support of federal spending cuts, were rewarded with generous media attention. Yet in the past few months dozens of protests against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, killer drones, no-cuts to government spending, police brutality and other progressive causes have been carried out and I didn’t see any of those rallies getting coverage.

It’s hard to imagine that the mainstream media has been intentionally ignoring progressive causes while giving attention to the rallies of the extreme right. But consider that when a broad coalition of black activist groups, which had been spearheaded by the Nation of Islam, took to the streets to protest the bombing of Libya and raise awareness of social ills domestically for the Millions in Harlem March in New York City, there was no media attention.

The same could be said for the Israeli Tent City protest, which has been happening since early August.  Tens of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in Jerusalem, Haifa and a dozen other Israeli cities in what they are calling a Million Man March to protest that country’s rising cost of living. And yet as bombings by Hamas makes news day in and day out in western media outlets, what is pegged as the largest demonstration in Israeli history since the Lebanon protest can’t get any place on the TV screen here stateside.

Any suppression of news is considered censorship and by ignoring antiwar and other far-left protests, not only is the mainstream media missing important stories and failing to act as the watchdog for the 1^st through 3^rd Estates, it is also propagating agendas, particularly corporate, right and centrist political agendas, which seeks to suggest that there is no visible opposition to the U.S. wars and other international and domestic policy issues.  This is why it is so frustrating for those in the far left, progressive and even the black nationalist communities, who have to sit and listen as pundits and commentators spout off about the lack of appeal for their causes within the general public when the unpublicized and unreported reality suggest something totally different.

Charing Ball is the author of the blog People, Places & Things.

(New York Times) — Anniversaries are hard to resist for most media outlets. The stories are evergreen, the advertising potential plentiful.  But in documenting the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, there is a fine line between commemoration and exploitation.  Mindful of this, television networks, magazines and others planning special coverage of the anniversary have weighed issues like how much American audiences can stomach, and how much such a solemn occasion should be viewed as a business opportunity.  There are no uniform answers, and media outlets are approaching it differently. Time magazine is running no ads at all. Newsweek and People have sold ads just as they would for any other issue. Cable channels, which are devoting big blocks of their schedules to Sept. 11-related programming, are also largely running commercials as usual. But there exceptions; CNN, for example, is to show a joint HBO-Time special commercial free. In its regular Sunday edition on Sept. 11, The New York Times is publishing a special section that will contain only commemorative ads.

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(New York Times) — Even the Qaddafi government escort could not contain his disbelief at the sloppiness of the fraud: bloodstains his colleagues had left on bedsheets in a damaged hospital room for more than a week as evidence of civilian casualties from Western airstrikes.  “This is not even human blood!” the escort erupted to group of journalists, making a gesture with his hands like squeezing a tube. “I told them, ‘Nobody is going to believe this!’ ” he explained, as Elizabeth Palmer, a correspondent for CBS News, later recalled. His name was withheld for his protection.

For the more than 100 international journalists cloistered here at the invitation of the Qaddafi government, its management — or, rather, staging — of public relations provided a singular inside view of how this autocracy functions in a crisis.  As the incident of the faked blood shows, the Qaddafi government’s most honest trait might be its lack of pretense to credibility or legitimacy. It lies, but it does not try to be convincing or even consistent.  Government officials often insisted the journalists watch grisly footage of public beheadings, presented on state television as scenes from rebel-held Benghazi, even though the officials surely knew that all the major news organizations had correspondents in Benghazi confirming that there were no such executions.

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