ABSTRACT
A set of assumptions-from the neutrality of press and broadcast news to the centrality of news viewing in shaping civic values-tend to structure much research involving young people, news and political knowledge. Several of these assumptions involve notions of linear causality which place youth who neither seek nor consume news, or who do so in a highly critical manner, in deficit as citizens. Take, for instance, the idea that the consumption of print news presages more informed citizenship (Graber 1988; Chaffee and Yang 1990; Putnam 2001); or the conclusion that higher levels of trust in the polity and in the news media are linked to greater participation in adulthood (discussed by Amadeo, Torney-Purta, and Barber [2004] in their circle paper on youth and trust); or again, the belief that the news media, like the family and the school, are vehicles for positive (adult-approved) political socialisation. A few studies engage critically with these common assumptions, drawing attention to complicating factors such as young people’s representation by the news (Wayne et al. 2008), their representation in politics or their involvement in the production of news or political stories (Buckingham 2000). Further research (Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham 2007; Carter 2008; Olsson and Dahlgren 2010) approaches these topics from the intersection of news reception, the social contexts of youth, and the embedding of politico-civic beliefs and identities via everyday contexts. This latter confluence of the everyday social and spatial contexts in which young people live and from which they develop their views on news, politics and citizenship, is the one at which our research departs in asking:
RQ1: How do life experiences, particularly spatial experiences of social disadvantage, exclusion or privilege inflect young people’s material and symbolic news consumption patterns and their interpretations of mediated politics?
