Fox Reports Youth Vote Accurately!?

How could this be?! This is indeed breaking news, because it may very well be the first time FoxNews has done something right - er... correctly.

This comes on the heals of the CNN blunder in reporting a lot of misinformation about young people and the youth vote in 2008. Add to that Naomi Wolf and Courtney Martin and you're ready for your own nuclear meltdown of frustration.

There's been a pretty substantial rapid response linking to a brilliant post by Mike that details data and a fact sheet for reporters who can't bring themselves to research - and the response has been tremendous!

Rob Anderson from CP went after Naomi at the Washington Post, we hit CNN on FM, and Campus Progress nailed Courtney here.

After posting Mike's piece everywhere and emailing it to CNN, NPR, and all of my own local news and radio stations I figured the last to talk about young people would be a Republican News Network who so clearly excludes young people. But they did. As you can see they addressed all of our main issues.

The only fault I have with this is that the piece likens youth to phrases like "Yo Dude" when, shocking as it may seem, young people do have a capability to converse like adults and understand complex topics.

Alexandra Acker ED of the Young Democrats of America was interviewed in the piece and later commented to me

"One thing that stood out was Frank Luntz’s outrageous statement that young people want to be addressed as “Yo, dude” whereas I had spoken about the need for candidates to take young voters seriously and talk about issues they care about."

Another interesting thing to mention is the ways in which FoxNews reaches out to young commentators like Acker when CNN's and the piece on 60 Minutes was largely dominated by older generations who are out of touch with the reality of the Millennial Generation.

Fox is notorious for connecting with younger demographics (see MySpace, the Simpsons, and FoxNews Porn) - CNN's only got Anderson Cooper and Soledad O'Brien. Let's face it almost 3/4 of their airwaves are full of old angry Lou Dobbs, Larry "he's still alive?" King, and the Jack/Wolf Playdate (and my TV is always on CNN!)

The reporter doing the piece seemed young. Probably not 25, but she's definitely younger than Lou Dobbs. And Acker said she made a real effort to understand the issues:

She "went to resources like YDA and YVS, did follow-up with me after the interview to make sure she had the Harvard quote right, but CNN just recycled the same old, tired storyline."

Acker goes on to speculate that the youth friendly ways in which FoxNews and its family targets young people is perhaps because they are more aware of our generation's purchase power. And I think she's got something there.

While I agree that Fox is bad, evil, worse than bad and evil, I think if they could make more money by supporting Democrats they'd flip parties in a heartbeat. By targeting young people, regardless of party affiliation, with products, musicians, and the like their advertisers make more money and thus the network banks a pretty sweet deal.

In many ways we're being used - but at the same time, they're the only ones talking about the importance of young people in the first place - so what do ya do?

Until we can get mainstream news sources to report these facts correctly, you have to give props to the ones who do, even when they're traditionally crazy nutbars.

Cross posted to Kos, please recommend