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Since many of us here at Campaign Desk fall into the category of “young” as defined by the press, we eagerly dove into Timothy Egan’s front-page New York Times story today headlined “Vote Drives Gain Avid Attention of Youth in ’04.”
The headline doesn’t overpromise: We do learn that, yes, kids these days do seem to be paying attention to “vote drives.” And we get stats about how more young people appear to be registering to vote this year, that Democrats and Republicans are both targeting them (something that, thanks to the army of clipboard-wielding students accosting us daily on Broadway, we can attest to personally), and we get a few anecdotes about how engaged young people are. There’s also a painful attempt to put a label on young voters: One of Egan’s sources calls them “dot-nets,” which sound vaguely like bug-collecting devices.
But beyond that, we learn little. In essence, Egan’s piece is just another of those infamous swing voter stories we’ve regularly whacked for singling out one demographic group and suggesting that, as Egan quotes a source in concluding his story, “They are the biggest pool of untapped potential voters, and they are easy to influence.”
This is a classic case of a reporter delivering four of the five W’s — who, what, where, and when — but forgetting number five (WHY?), which is the story behind the story. Why, assuming Egan is correct, are young people more engaged this year? Why is that unusual? If they’re so cynical, why would they be “easy to influence”? And why do so many get their news from places like “The Daily Show”?
There’s a story here somewhere inside Egan’s story. We just wish he had let it out.
–Bryan Keefer
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