Ignorance is Ignorance

We all know the cliche "Ignorance is Bliss." Well I'm here to tell you that ignorance is not always bliss. In fact, most of the time it's just damn ignorance.
Where the real question comes in here is who's to blame for ignorance. In this particular instance I am ranting about the general public's ignorance with regard to politics. This is particularly true in younger citizens. A recent poll in North Carolina showed that less than half of the voters could name the party in charge and that younger voters are least able to answer basic questions about state politics and to get out and vote.
As someone who only very recently became of voting age, this kind of infuriates me. However sadly I have experienced this apathy firsthand.
In the most recent presidential election I was too young to vote by a couple months. This was the first election that my brother could vote in. The magnitude of this election, as everyone knows, was huge. Obviously I was a little peeved that my vote wouldn't count and jealous that my brother's did. However, my brother could not have cared less about voting. I heard every excuse from "what difference will one vote make" to "Maryland always goes Democratic anyway."
I guess I can take some consolation in the latter argument because it is true that Maryland always goes blue. I was finally able to convince him that of any election to not vote in this would be the worst.
Is it his fault that he doesn't care about politics? Yes and no. Each person needs to take a minimal amount of initiative but also the people around him and the media need to take some sort of attempt to engage him in politics.
The solution that my friends and I have found is to become a little informed about a broad range of topics and argue until we're blue in the face. As someone who is fairly stubborn this is not only fun for me, but also helps me become more informed and strengthen my views. What the media lacks in engaging me I make up with friendly debate.
The problem with our generation is the perpetual thought that our parents care enough for all of us and as long as they're voting why should we care. The obvious fallacy in this argument is that we will one day be our parents. If we don't learn to start caring now when do we? Is there some point in life when we decide that we should start caring about politics? We have to start now or our country's political activeness will slowly fall by the wayside. This is not an option.
Ignorance is no longer an option for citizens. Whose fault it is is sort of a moot point now. We are in a red alert and something--either by the media, our peers, ourselves or a combination--needs to change the political mindset of our generation.

Posted by Jordan Powell

Why should I care?

Why should I care?
This is a question we hear all too often in our day-to-day lives. Not only do we hear it from others' mouths, but each of us are culprits of using this dreaded phrase.
This crisis of apathy has hit the local politic world especially hard. In our Journalism course, we recently did a study of several newspapers from around the state of North Carolina. The numbers are disturbing:

83--newspapers studied
5209--articles in said papers
6--percent of articles covering local politics
5--percent of articles covering state politics
11--percent of articles covering national politics
27--percent of articles covering sports

The Wilmington StarNews seems far ahead of the curve with 9.1 percent of its articles covering local politics, while the Winston-Salem Journal lags behind the rest with only 4.6 percent. The rest of the papers--Greensboro News & Record, Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News & Observer and the Fayetteville Observer--all hover around 6 percent.
Who takes the blame for this? Are the newspapers shirking their responsibility? Or do we just not care enough for the papers to validate including more information?
This question may prove impossible to answer. Yes, newspapers should have an obligation to report the news as it is, but in an age when papers are hurting already they can't take s chance of losing more readers by reporting news that people don't want to read.
Why should I care? As a population we care more about baseball and gossip than town hall meetings. This is an absolute truth. But one of the fundamental roles of the media is that of GateKeeper. This is to say that the media has complete control over the information that we get and by not giving us the whole scope of information the papers are essentially keeping us in the dark.
Why should I care? Local politics directly affect each of us. If we don't care then the system doesn't working. Our current political structure relies on us caring and us caring relies on the papers and other media relaying the best information.
We should care we're just not being allowed to.

Posted by Jordan Powell