Column: Generation Z gets an F

by Jack Zhang

Meet “Generation Z.” The pundits are still determining when we were born, but most agree that it was between the late 90’s and the late 2000’s. We grew up with developed internet, social media, and with convenience put above all else. Forget millennials as the delinquent stewards of democracy—at least they still read online newspapers and journals. According to a 2017 study, Generation Z newspaper readership lags behind other age groups by nearly 30 percent.

Somehow, technology has made our information become both more democratized and top-down at once. We can laugh at Trump’s gaffes live, but we also think little past what’s presented to us in a five-minute YouTube politics video. We think of ourselves as activists when we point out Twitter typos or watch a NowThis clip on Medicare. Generation Z hasn’t rejected information, but we’re more concerned with superficial understanding than the nitty-gritty of politics and ideology.

The inane and otherwise unreportable things that went ignored by mainstream journalism are now easily accessible to all of us, and Generation Z is eating it up. Real investigative journalism is already hard to come by these days. Imagine when Generation Z, the cohort that has already forgone substantive reporting in favor of Buzzfeed videos, becomes the main purchasing bloc of the world. Real journalism, along with all our democratic institutions and the American political tradition, will wither away unless Generation Z supports and believes in it. As the Washington Post is so keen on saying, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Beyond their unwitting weakening of solid journalism, Generation Z has gone even further: we have swapped emotion for reason. It’s not hard to ridicule Trump for his antics or Obama for his stuttering, which is why it’s easy for us to substitute these things for real political engagement. The convenience of personality-based politics has superseded real journalism—but we shouldn’t blame millennials, Generation Z, or even technology for that. Instead, we should build trust in reliable and substantial journalism for the future.