Eyes on the Issues
Phyllis Kaniss Works to Energize Young Voters
By 1972, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment had lowered the voting
age to 18, and half of the nation’s 18-to-24 year-olds
voted in that year’s presidential election. By 1996,
the proportion of that age group who voted had plunged to
about one-third, the lowest participation rate of any age
group in the election that gave President Clinton his second
term.
Studies show that large numbers of young people have become
apathetic about politics. They feel little connection between
government and their own lives; they believe they don’t
have the information that would allow them to vote or discuss
political issues intelligently, and they feel ignored by
politicians. What’s gone wrong?
It’s a question that has exercised Phyllis Kaniss,
CW’72, national director of Student Voices, a Penn-based
project dedicated to increasing the civic awareness
and involvement of high school students. In the four years of the program’s
existence, Kaniss has tried to reverse that trend.
Local newspapers, TV, and radio have played a key role in
turning young people off to the news and alienating them
from politics, Kaniss argues, citing negative political advertising
and coverage that is more likely to focus on a candidate’s
financial wrongdoings than on proposals for public spending.
When it comes to covering schools themselves, journalists
are interested mostly in stories about guns or drugs, she
says. “All too often young people see themselves reflected
in the media as victims or perpetrators of crime. In Student
Voices we work with the media to show them how important
it is to cover students when they question candidates or
when they come up with an issues agenda, so that kids will
see images of themselves as active, involved citizens.”
For Kaniss, Student Voices is the latest phase of a career
that has explored the intersection between urban development
and the media. Despite an interest in journalism as an undergraduate—she
was a reporter and editor for the Daily Pennsylvanian—she
majored in regional science (an amalgam of geography, urban
planning, and economics) before going on to Cornell to earn
a Ph.D. in the field.
She returned to SAS in 1978 to teach regional science and
urban studies, and later wrote Making Local News (1991),
an examination of how the media covers the city. Moving to
the Annenberg School, she decided to test her earlier observations
on local news by following reporters covering the 1991 Philadelphia
mayoral campaign. The book that emerged was The Media
and the Mayor’s Race: The Failure of Urban Political
Reporting (1995). The research confirmed her sense that
the city’s newspapers and broadcast outlets were not
giving the electorate the news they needed.
Kaniss was convinced that any attempt to improve reporting
on local politics would have to be made outside traditional
channels. Her thoughts were also turning to raising the political
awareness of young people, partly inspired by conversations
with her own sons, now 14 and 17. “I wondered how my
kids were going to learn about politics and current events.” What
if there were a website, she wondered, where students could
read about issues, candidates, and the mechanics of voting
as well as the reporting of the mainstream media? Would young
people be more likely to think and talk about civic affairs
if they knew what their peers were concerned about? Could
you catch them in schools, just before they turned voting
age, and turn them on to politics?
The brainchild of her musings is Student Voices. The project
was pioneered in 33 public high schools in Philadelphia during
the 1999 mayoral campaign and expanded nationwide in 2000
with funding from the Annenberg Foundation and the Pew Charitable
Trusts.
At the heart of the project is student-voices.org,
a website customized for each of the 11 cities where Voices
has worked. The sites are a resource for students to learn
more about their cities and a platform for them to discuss
the pros and cons of policy issues. A recent edition of the
Denver site focused on the upcoming mayoral election and
featured profiles of the two main candidates in the run-off
election. The site led with a report on the city’s
Student Voices civics fair and carried political articles
from local newspapers as well as information on the mayor’s
role in Denver, quick facts about the city, and a “youth
issues agenda” with lists of concerns from local classrooms
and online student discussions.
“ Research shows, in city after city, that kids are
paying more attention to the news,” Kaniss observed,
adding that Voices also brings young people and candidates
together for lively exchanges.
“There’s more civic knowledge and more interest
to register and vote. There’s a big difference in attitudes
before and after the project.”
Kaniss is particularly gratified that Student Voices seems
to be reaching so many youths whose lives are stricken by
poverty and violence. They are the least likely to get involved
in the public arena, and it is their voices that most need
to be heard. “It gives these kids hope,” she
said. “It makes them realize that if you speak up,
something may change.” n
Jon Hurdle is a freelance writer based in Ambler, PA.
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