Now teenagers experience the same unfairness. No surprise, then, that both groups are misunderstood, even feared, by so many people. Conflict has increasingly driven the news over recent years. The penchant for framing stories around these combative elements is even more pronounced at the top of the front page and is truer still when it comes to describing the actions or statements of government officials. But a steady diet of failure and malfeasance does not provide an accurate picture of the world.
Few people enjoy being made to feel hopeless.
A survey last March by the Freedom Forum showed 53 percent of Americans believing the press has too much freedom to do what it wants. By September that had gone down to 42 percent, a decline the study's authors attributed to greater distance from the Clinton-Lewinsky stories. The great journalism of this century has included stirring tales of progress, from the Wright brothers' flight in 1903 to Neil Armstrong's 1969 walk on the moon, from women winning the vote in 1920 to the Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation in 1954. Much of it resulted from hard digging on subjects others were unwilling to pay attention to, from Rachel Carson's pioneering environmental writing to The Washington Post's investigation of the Watergate break-in. News Jobs AP Shopping Archives Entertain.