DailyKos, the MSM, and the Youth Vote Narrative

In the past, I've written about the media narrative surrounding young voters. First, how the media screwed up big-time and perpetuated myths about young voter apathy, and then about how youth and civic participation orgs helped change that narrative.

I had a big plan to do a post-election media analysis of youth vote stories in the major newspapers and magazines. Only problem (if you can call it that), was that the stories around the youth vote this year are overwhelmingly positive. Josh notes one instance below, but there are many more.

The Washington Post lavished praise on youth turnout and the benefits it has and may continue to bestow on Democrats. Joe Garofoli (old faithful) pumped us up in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a great piece about creating a youth vote culture (something we're highly in favor of here).

Some of our own helped steer the media narrative as well. Billy Wimsatt of The League of Young Voters had a piece in Mother Jones, The Nation ran a piece (which linked to our "Wave" graphic) which got syndicated by Yahoo!, and some young social/political entrepreneurs wrote about youth impact in the Western States over at Tom Paine.

But what about the blogs? Kos wrote a (positive) short post about the youth impact on the elections, but the community is rarely receptive to the ideas and concerns of its younger members. In fact, from my experiences writing on the site and trying to drum up support for young voters and youth projects, I would say that the community opinion on young voters ranges from somewhere between non-committal to downright hostile.

This situation seems to be coming to something of a head. In a comments thread dedicated to nominating new front-page writers, there were a slew of commenters clamoring for younger voices on the site. And in the last three days there have been a number of diaries on the topic directly calling out the Kos community for its open hostility to young voters.

15-30 year olds make up something like 12% of all Kos users. We are the future for which everyone in the Kos community is fighting so hard. We are some of the most entrepreneurial progressives working today. Do More Than Vote, Young People For, Drinking Liberally, Music for America, Students for a New American Politics . . . these are all organizations created by and run by "Millenial" voters. And the list could go on and on.

So why is the rest of the Kos community so hostile to us? Why do diaries about young voters rarely get any attention? Why are they ignored, or at best infrequently rescued to the front page (Thanks SusanG!)? Why are commenters so hostile to youth?

How do we break the tired, conventional wisdom that has settled in among the older Kossacks and get them working to support programs that engage and train young voters and the next generation of progressives?

I don't have answers, but its a disturbing trend in the blogosphere that's been around for a while, and still does not seem to be diminishing despite the glowing reviews of our 2006 turnout in the mainstream media.