Natalia,

I'm still having a difficult time seeing the consistency in your three posts. In the first, you speak of Gen Next's "abandonment of traditional mediums [sic]" resulting from the network media's apparent employment of negative and false sensationalism directed toward young people. Furthermore, responding to the concern that Gen Next has no idea what's going on in the world, you retort, "Who can blame us?"

In your second post, however, after arguing that the reason young people catch flak for being "uninformed" might be because there is no way to measure our method of news consumption which properly reflects new technological realities, you assert that young people really do care about contemporary political and cultural issues and that, in addition, claims about a lack of news viewership among Gen Next "go unfounded" in the light of certain research.

Does the thesis of your first post, then, also go "unfounded" by the light of your second post? Either your opinion has, since the beginning of the dialogue, changed to some extent, or else I am too sap-headed to understand it.

Also a word on your last post's puzzling political tangents. As if your points clearly followed in a nice logical succession, you claim that, yes, Gen Next is interested in the news, and foreign policy, and Iraq, and war casualties, and that, oh yeah, we're also interested in how our heartless, bloodthirsty president is cutting education and "hypocritically" driving up the deficit to fuel his "relentless war effort."

Somehow, I must have missed how this blatant editorializing was central to your argument. (Never mind that, in his first term, Bush increased federal education spending by 60.8 percent, and that this year's budget deficit has shrunk to 247.7 million, a mere 1.8 percent of GDP). But anyway…

On the subject of "headliners" and selective news consumption, I agree. It's unfortunate that, because the diversity of the new media allows it, young people (as well as old) "only pay heed to what they can foresee themselves agreeing with."

But I see little difference between Gen Next's selective news consumption as informed by their ideology and your finding solace in CNN, which you describe as your "liberal haven" where "news stories ring true with me and the facts of the story aren't skewed." Is that the example you want young consumers of the new media to follow?

Instead, Gen Next should take advantage of the new media to broaden its political and cultural outlook and to encounter, as you put it in an earlier post, "the truth from all perspectives." Through cable news, political webzines, innumerable blogs, and talk radio, the new media make it even easier for the informed citizen to consume news that is, to steal a phrase from one of the undisputed starlets of the new media, "fair and balanced."

To start, a Gen Nexter might browse the popular RealClearPolitics.com and find links to online articles with both conservative and liberal perspectives on current events, from the Weekly Standard to the Nation or the Washington Post to the Washington Times. From there, one could peruse the best of the blogosphere, starting with the aforementioned Instapundit and National Review Online's "The Corner" and moving to the leftist Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. Then, for a bit of evening television, one might switch to CNN for a bit of "Inside Politics," supplemented with a touch of Fox's Brit Hume and his "Special Report."

Our choices are numerous and diverse. In the universe of the new media, market forces have driven networks, newspapers, webzines, and even blogs to deliver a highly valued product, and it is left to the upcoming generations, notably Gen Next, to reap the harvest.

-- Ryan