- Julie Smith/AP
- Sorry, Rush (and other Rush).
Each generation alive today is tempted to think of itself as less ignorant than its successors—whose sources of information seem new, strange, and unreliable. For instance, a new Pew Research Center study shows that 60 percent of baby boomers, when asked for their sources of news about politics and government, listed local TV news; but only 46 percent of Gen Xers did the same and 37 percent of millennials. But 61 percent of the millennials named Facebook.
But then, so are local newspapers. Pew asked roughly 3,000 Americans about 42 so-called sources of news and information, and although Drudge, Glenn Beck, and Ed Schultz were among them, the local daily was not. Pew was interested only in the media audience that goes online, and the domestic newspapers in its list were those who market their websites nationally—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today. The Times, the highest-scoring of the four, is read by 17 percent of the millennials, 12 percent of the boomers, but only 9 percent of the Gen Xers (which might means its marketing has missed a generation).
