Self-education is vital to political engagement
If you haven’t heard by now, there’s a presidential election taking place. No, I’m not referring to the one on the USC campus for Undergraduate Student Government but instead the one for the White House. The bid for the U.S. presidency is revving up today, as all the candidates stump across Iowa and the state’s caucuses get underway.
Hillary Clinton. Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump. And the list goes on. A whole slate of people to vote for. But how do the caucuses even work? I know they mark the first time in this year’s election when the American voter actually weighs in on who they want for president. It’s also a time when the media analyzes and projects what this could mean for the final leg of the race in November. But after those two reasons, I’m not even sure.
And I’m definitely not the only 20-something who is scratching her head at this process.
At this time last year we still had someone we could turn to that could fill in these knowledge gaps. His name was Jon Stewart and he ran this very funny Comedy Central program called The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. This show would help explain where we were in the country’s political process. Stewart held that position for 16 years — a majority of your lifetime if you’re a millennial reading this — and carried us through four presidential elections, a handful of congressional races and all the political scandals in between.
When I cast my first vote for a U.S. president back in 2012 in the race between President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney, I followed the election closely by watching clips of The Daily Show. I remember laughing along to Stephen Colbert’s satirical persona on The Colbert Report. Now, the greats are gone.
The Daily Show is still on with its new host Trevor Noah. Yet, as a recent Slate article showed, not as many people are tuning in. The ratings show Noah’s Daily Show is down 30 percent in the 18-49 age demographic, according to Slate.
This is compounded by the fact that at Stewart’s height, according to a Pew Research study, 21 percent of young people regularly turned into The Daily Show for campaign news, nearly tying the 23 percent of millennials who use ABC, NBC and CBS as sources.
We are now entering a period where every individual must educate him or herself on the issues at hand. There is still a presidential election taking place, with or without Comedy Central. As college millennials enter into the first election without a funnyman to help us make sense of it all, it is up to us to do our best.
We still have resources to help. Jenny Di heads the Political Student Assembly within USG. The organization works to guide students through the political process and build engagement. PSA holds viewing parties for large political events. Last month, they screened President Obama’s last State of the Union address. In the coming weeks they’ll be a viewing party for Super Tuesday.
Yet, despite the engagement efforts, Di said that she hears some disparaging remarks from students. Some students said that because they don’t follow the news closely they are not able to get involved in politics.
“You shouldn’t have to follow the news to think you understand politics,” Di said. “Even if they don’t know what’s going on, given basic information you still have opinion. If you have core opinions then you can connect.”
It’s basically what The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report did for us all of those years. They provided the information and we listened to their commentary. Agree or disagree with them, we now had the information to help us inform our opinions.
This election will also fully utilize social media platforms like Twitter. Before this time, people had to regularly tune into CNN or sit down and read a newspaper — shocking, right? To be informed, people made conscious efforts to research topics. Today you can just scroll through your timeline and see the articles your friends share or the candidates’ tweets.
Luckily, social media is a default tool for most millennials, so we are already ahead of the curve in consuming politics.
Now, it is just up to us to be willing to plug in politically. For most of you reading this, you’re not in Iowa. You won’t be going through the caucus system today. But the election is coming to a ballot box near you soon. It’s time to start preparing. You have all the tools you need to shape the political future of this country. Just use them.
After reading “Wait An L.A. Minute” on Tuesdays, join Jordyn Holman in her millennial conversations on Twitter @JordynJournals. She’s a senior studying print and digital journalism.