Convention and Cringe

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In 2016, while an editor at Time magazine’s student edition, Time for Kids, I took a thirteen-year-old to the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland: Maple Buescher, a local middle schooler with braces and braids. She produced daily reports on the coronation of Donald Trump, interviewed delegates, and filed colorful asides about area attractions, including an ice cream shop serving an election-themed passion fruit sorbet called “You’re Fired.” Days later, I went to Philadelphia to meet Olivia Branan, a twelve-year-old from San Diego picked to cover the Democratic National Convention. She reported on Hillary Clinton becoming the first woman to receive a major-party nomination; Kelly O’Donnell, of NBC News, gave an on-camera interview.

The kid reporters are now college journalists. Buescher, twenty-one, is a politics major starting her senior year at Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine, where she’s been the editor in chief of the Bates Student. (She’s also a columnist for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer.) Branan is twenty, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, double-majoring in media and global studies, and a reporter for Berkeley’s student-run newspaper, the Daily Californian. They are among the estimated forty-one million members of Gen Z eligible to vote this year—and in November, both will vote for president for the first time. The other day, we logged on for a virtual catch-up.

“I’ve been fairly impressed by the amount of news and news analysis that has been produced in such an incredibly fast and challenging environment,” Buescher said. “And I’ve been impressed by the amount of just simple fact-checking that’s going on. There’s a lot of attention to detail and a lot of rigorous work being done.” They both read copiously. “Apple News is my biggest thing,” Branan told me, “because it has all of the big ones—New York Times, Wall Street Journal—everything on one page.” She doesn’t watch the news on TV, she said, “but I do get a lot of political TikToks, and on X I’m seeing a lot of political conversations. I wouldn’t consider that news, but I am taking in a lot of political information and different voices on social media.”

Buescher, too. “Just being on those apps, I absorb a lot of political information and political opinions and political news—couched with the opinions of whoever is presenting it.” She also follows the Times, reads the AP, and listens to NPR. For local news, she checks the Plain Dealer and the Lewiston Sun Journal.

While on social media, they keep an eye out for falsehoods. “One of the things I saw recently was Trump saying Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated,” Branan said. The claim was debunked. But the whole plotline felt like a diversion. “What’s been interesting to me is that a lot of the coverage I’ve seen hasn’t necessarily been about the policies or the platforms of the candidates. It’s just been, like, ‘Is this controversial thing true?’” 

“There’s so much political conversation happening that the mainstream media seems to not even have the language to discuss,” Buescher observed. Try to explain “brat summer,” she said, “and it sounds like nonsense to the majority of normal Americans who don’t spend as much time on TikTok as I do. Part of what makes the memes popular is the absurdity, so trying to square the circle of the absurdity with the more serious political conversation is strange.” 

They both agreed—it’s cringeworthy. What they want is serious political conversation: sit-downs with the presidential candidates, questions about their records and what they plan to do, if elected. Plus, “I’d love to see more coverage of the fact that this is also a congressional election,” Buescher said. “There are issues on the ballot besides whether you want to vote for Trump or Harris.” 

What would they like to see less of? “I’m sick of seeing the headlines about what Trump has said about his opponent,” Branan said. “It’s become redundant. It should still be covered. I just think that right now, in this election, in order to find substantial information about the candidates and what they stand for, you have to dig through all this surface-level clickbait.”

“I think the speed of the news cycle is actually, potentially, fairly dangerous,” Buescher chimed in. “Because when you have an infinite amount of differing and conflicting news analyses at your fingertip, it can be difficult to slow down and get the facts and digest them at a pace that seems sustainable.” She’d been thinking about what that means for her life after graduation and about journalism’s imperative to adapt to a changing world. “At a certain level, I don’t necessarily want it to,” she said. “There is so much value in traditional, reliable media organizations. In this election, it seems they’ve been fighting to keep up with the tide of social media.”

Whether they could win that fight, we weren’t sure. Buescher and Branan maintain skepticism about the political content that pops up on their social feeds—and still, they keep on scrolling. “I’m just very curious to see where trust in the media goes following this election,” Branan said.

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Jaime Joyce is a writer and editor based in New York.