Media generations: MTV and the AARP crowds can set government right again

MTV may save the republic
Ladies Home Journal and the Crown Forum book How to Raise an American and even The AARP Magazine will help.
’Bout time someone did something. Really. It’s all about time or at least age. The issue is how to motivate the youth vote, and those media are onto something.
The big news is Viacom’s countercultural music broadcaster announcing it will now take political ads.
It’s for the money of course. When Sen. Barrack Obama passed up public funding of his Democratic presidential campaign, he put a monster ad budget in play with a youth orientation.
But an ad is information, too, not just a commercial. If campaign advertising weren't suddenly cool, MTV wouldn’t break its 27-year ban against marketing candidates.
This is watershed stuff. Potentially, anyway.
Just a few years ago David T. Z. Mindich wrote Tuned Out, explaining why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. He said political process alienated the young who found it immoral, unresponsive to the people and irrelevant along with the news media that covered politics.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam broke that ground with his landmark study of civic disengagement.
And journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., decried the exchange between politicians and the governed as “unintelligent” in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics.
For the smart set, the young set, the MTV set to tune back in as both the Iowa caucuses and the Obama millennials indicate is big for the future of self-government.
A letter to Reader's Digest calls this "The Facebook Election." But ultimately, the writer said, two things will have to happen:

• These young activists will have to run for office;
• And leadership in both major parties will have to step aside to "let younger, more open minds take over."

Too soon to say if the information industry and especially newspapers will reverse their own downward spiral related to civic malaise.
Mindich anticipated some rise from the ashes, because “despite their disengagement with news, young people are as thoughtful and passionate and self-reflective as they have ever been, ready to interact with news if we just provide the right conditions for them to do so.”
One condition could be for parents and grandparents to be civic-minded and to model participatory government for the generations to come of voting age.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, started Take Your Kids 2 Vote, promoting the idea of adults taking their children into polling places with them. She remembered it when she was a kid.
She and cofounder Chriss Winston researched Election Day involvement and wrote How to Raise an American.
Naturally http://www.takeyourkids2vote.org/ is their Web site. Emphasis is on recollection and narrative.
“Sharing your memories of voting makes kids realize their family is part of the American experience,” Blyth said to writer Nick Kolakowski of AARP http://www.aarpmagazine.org/.
And that’s cool too. For the self-described “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” to publicize civic lessons across the generations really does link MTV’s ad policy news with shoring up the Republic’s future.
Rap that tune.