Essay On First Amendment Ignorance

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Kids' First Amendment ignorance isn't disastrous

A massive new survey of attitudes toward the First Amendment among high school students, indicating that many kids are apathetic about freedom of the press, is sure to cause furrowed brows and furious fulmination in newspaper editorial offices.

As both a First Amendment freak and the father of a 10th grader, though, I can't get too excited about the figures released this week by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The numbers are discouraging for people in the news media and they're absolutely grim for those of us who don't like it when people show too much trust in government.

More than one-third of the students questioned by University of Connecticut researchers believe newspapers …show more content…
If you told them that the First Amendment protects their right to wear clothing four sizes too large and hear music that makes their fathers send away for boarding school brochures, you'd probably get 100 percent support for it.

Frankly, it's really not bad that high school students take this freedom for granted. That shows a need for more civic education, but if 16-year-olds went around worrying about freedom of religion and a free press, something would be really wrong.

I haven't seen any studies to back this up, but the media share blame for the fact that a sizeable minority of young people think the government should pre-clear what gets published. Kids today are aware of The New York Times and CNN, but for them, "the media" includes Jerry Springer, reality TV and infomercials.

It's likely that teenagers don't even see the straight news industry as we see ourselves. To us, the First Amendment means big stories from Watergate to Abu Ghraib. To the kids, it's updates on the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston breakup and Michael Jackson's arrival in court (replayed repeatedly as panels of law professors and ex-prosecutors analyze a ruling an obscure pre-trial

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