Comment

Children, News and Political Citizenship

Cynthia Carter

Radical cultural critic Henry Giroux argues that in the US, consumerism has become the only type of citizenship of offer. Children, he suggests, are now 'growing up corporate'. Their experience of society is becoming increasingly individual and commercial and less social and civic. The language spoken is of the market and its demands for profit rather than of democracy and the political rights and responsibilities of citizens. What are the implications of this? The cost of this shift, Giroux suggests, is high. Today, commercial culture is becoming increasingly powerful at the expense of the democratic foundations of civil society.

The same concern is currently engaging policymakers, academics and citizens elsewhere in the world. For example, in early 2008, the UK government commissioned independent assessments of evidence relating to the impacts, both beneficial and problematic, of the commercial world on children's well-being. Literature reviews are to focus on 'Children's and Families' Commercial Engagement', 'The Children's Market', and 'Consumption and the Ecology of Family Life', emphasising how individuals engage with commercial messages. While these reviews should provide useful information about children in consumer culture, it remains unclear how they might relate to children's needs and experiences beyond the commercial world.

Over the years, children and media research has primarily analysed the various effects of entertainment genres on child audiences. Children's relationship to factual media and their engagement with the social and civic have received much less attention. Recently, however, there has been an increasing interest, for instance, in how children are represented in the news and how children make sense of these representations. There is a smaller but now growing corpus of work looking at children's news, which variously examines its modes of production, representation and reception. It is perhaps understandable that children's news has been insufficiently studied, in part, because few countries around the world make news specifically for child audiences. Where children's news is available, it is primarily produced by public service broadcasters who are not directly driven by profit-making. Channel Four discontinued its weekly schools news programme First Edition in 2002 and Nickelodeon ceased production of Nick News in 2003. The reasons for the cancellation of both programmes were similar - they were costly to make and did not attract sufficient audiences to make them appealing to advertisers.

Colleagues and I have been talking to children and teenagers around the UK over the past year asking them for their views on the news (both adult and children's). We have found that they generally have a high regard for Children's BBC Newsround, the only children's television news bulletin and website produced in the UK. The bulletin is appreciated, in large part, because since its launch in 1972, it has related to young people as citizens, providing news that is understandable, useful and engages them with the world. However, since Newsround is produced to appeal to an audience of 8 to 12 year olds, it is unsurprising that the teenagers we have spoken to feel that it does not address them in a language with which they can identify, or that is sufficiently challenging. Since there is no news provision for teenagers in the UK, this audience is being asked to make a rather broad leap from children's to adult news - a hurdle which appears to be too broad for many.

One media researcher after another is now expressing concern about the problems associated with changing the lived culture of citizenship. Teenagers, many fear, are becoming increasingly disengaged from a political process which they believe largely ignores them and their interests. Many researchers investigating the relationship between young people and the news have noted that their political detachment from traditional politics is an entirely rational response to their exclusion from adult political life. Media producers who appear only to want to appeal to young people as consumer citizens must now be made to accept some responsibility for encouraging political citizenship by providing children and teenagers with critical and challenging news services that such young people clearly want and so richly deserve.