With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right? Not so, especially not teenagers and young adults, according to a report released last week by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In fact, most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news closely at all, the report, titled ‘Young People and News,’ concluded. It is based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults. Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, said that young people today do not make an appointment with news every day the way older adults do. ‘We found that most young adults don’t have an ingrained news habit,’ he said. ‘Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news […]