"How the pandemic is intensifying depression and anxiety among teenagers" PBS NewsHour 3/9/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: This week marks a full year since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic, and experts are increasingly concerned about the toll it is taking on the mental health of young people in the United States. With in-person classes closed for months for many students, there are also concerns the risks of youth suicide are being exacerbated. Stephanie Sy reports.
The dramatic growth of YDSA chapters confirms that millennials don't think capitalism is working for them.
TAMPA, FLA.—In a fluorescent lit classroom with handmade posters covering one wall, approximately 15 high school students are chanting the words of black revolutionary Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and we must support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains." With some embarrassed giggling, they recite it once, twice, three times, led by their visiting speaker, Pamela Gomez of the Hillsborough Community Protection Coalition, an alliance of local progressive groups.
These students are some of the 40-odd members of the Blake High School chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA). The Tampa high school has 1,697 students, a majority of them black or Latino, and the YDSA chapter reflects that. The chapter also has a high concentration of LGBTQ students, the club's biggest demographic bloc.
The chapter is the brainchild of Graham Shelor, 17. Slim and sandy-haired, a contemporary dancer as well as an organizer, Shelor grew up in a “fairly liberal” household but became disillusioned with the Democratic Party during the 2016 elections. “They lied to me and the people of America that they were going to make it work,” he says. “It led to a domino effect of me seeing the flaws in the current American system.”
Blake's chapter is part of the youthful explosion of interest in socialism that has led to YDSA's impressive recent growth, with 130 chapters and organizing committees, a five-fold increase in two years. Since 2015, the average age of a DSA member has dropped from 64 to 30.
YDSA's members must be under 31 and are usually affiliated with a university or high school chapter. University chapters outnumber high school chapters by about 10 to 1. Like its parent organization, YDSA is multi-issue and “big tent." It doesn't require members to subscribe to any particular ideology beyond a commitment to feminism and an opposition to racism, imperialism, homophobia, transphobia and, of course, capitalism.
Chapters are largely autonomous: Though many work with their local DSA chapter, they're not required to. Often, they focus on youth and campus-specific labor issues, like graduate student organizing or fighting the privatization of facilities staff at state universities. Blake's YDSA has rallied in support of a long-promised wage hike for their teachers.
The meeting begins with announcements about upcoming actions, like canvassing for Medicare for All with the Tampa DSA. Then an invitation is issued to join Hillsborough Community Protection Coalition in campaigning for Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights and environmental justice.
For co-chair Kayla Ginty, 16, YDSA is more than a conduit to political action: It's led her to question inherited political beliefs and define her adult political identity.
“There are a lot of myths about what socialism is,” says Ginty. “High school is the perfect time to start educating ourselves. We are the next generation of voters. We can't keep depending on older adults to lead the way.”
“When the [2008 financial] crisis hit, I think a lot of [young] people experienced the impact of that on their home lives,” says YDSA National Coordinating Committee co-chair Michelle Fisher, 20. “Their parents got laid off, they got evicted from their homes, and they needed to be able to do something about it.”
In the 2016 primaries, 2 million people under 30—YDSA age—voted for Bernie Sanders, far more than voted for Clinton (770,000) and Trump (830,000) combined. A survey conducted by Harvard University's Institute of Politics found only a minority—42 percent—of millennials support capitalism.
There's a popular belief that youthful radicals turn into middle-aged conservatives. A 2014 study by Columbia University political scientists, however, found that “the political events of a voter's teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously important in the formation of these long-term partisan preferences.”
For the students in Blake High School YDSA, the “enormously important” political events of their formative years will include the surprisingly successful campaign of Bernie Sanders, the election-year failures of the Democratic Party, and the rise of Trump. These events took place against a backdrop of skyrocketing student debt, a dismal job market, a significant decline in upward mobility, and the first shocks of capitalism driven climate change.
“Our generation is really political because we have to be,” says Fisher.
SUMMARY: While much of the U.S. economy is on the rebound, New Mexico remains in the dumps since the recession hit a decade ago. Part of the problem may be a statewide brain drain, educated young people taking their careers -- and expertise -- elsewhere. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on New Mexico's mission to bring back its young, energetic entrepreneurs.
SUMMARY: In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, Boston's inner city often sees a spike in violence during the summer, when many students are out of school and on the streets. But as special correspondent Tina Martin from PBS station WGBH reports, one mother is trying to change that leading young people into nature.
SUMMARY: Widespread protests broke out across Russia on Sunday to denounce government corruption, the biggest show of defiance against President Vladimir Putin in years. Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Moscow and elsewhere. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports, then Judy Woodruff talks with journalist and author Masha Gessen about the protests and Putin.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Widespread protests broke out in cities across Russia's 11 time zones yesterday to denounce government corruption.
Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner begins our coverage.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): The sentence for Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was handed down this morning in Moscow: 15 days in jail for resisting police. He was also fined 20,000 rubles, about $350, for organizing yesterday's mass protests against alleged government corruption.
ALEXEI NAVALNY, Russian Opposition Leader (through interpreter): I think yesterday's events have shown there is a large number of voters in Russia who support a candidate who speaks for the fight against corruption. These people demand political representation.
MARGARET WARNER: The demonstrations were the biggest show of defiance against President Vladimir Putin since 2012. Tens of thousands rallied in 99 cities, from St. Petersburg and Moscow in the west, to Chita in Siberia, to the far Pacific coast port of Vladivostok.
Navalny generated the protests, in part, to demand the resignation of Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev. Navalny released a video earlier this month showcasing myriad mansions, yachts and vineyards Medvedev allegedly has amassed. Hundreds of protesters were arrested yesterday in Moscow and elsewhere.
Today, the European Union called for their release. A Putin spokesman said: “The Kremlin respects people's civic stance and their right to voice their position. We can't express the same respect to those who consciously misled people and provoked illegal actions.”
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said today:
SEAN SPICER, White House Press Secretary: The United States will monitor the situation. And we call on the government of Russia to immediately release all peaceful protesters.
MARGARET WARNER: For his part, Navalny has announced plans to challenge Putin for president in 2018. But his eligibility to do so is in question over previous criminal charges.
For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Margaret Warner.
SUMMARY: President Barack Obama's eldest daughter Malia announced plans to take a gap year before she attends Harvard in 2017, an idea that is taking hold among more and more students. In 2015, 30-40,000 students took a year off after graduating high school, a 20 percent jump. William Brangham talks to Joe O'Shea of Florida State University for more on the broader trend of deferring college.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): It's estimated that, last year in the U.S., 30,000 to 40,000 students tried out a gap year. And that's a 20 percent jump from the previous year.
So, what are they, why the growing interest?
To help fill in the picture, I'm joined from Boston by Joe O'Shea. He's the author of “Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes People in Ways the World Needs.” He also directs the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement at Florida State University.
So, Joe, welcome.
JOSEPH O'SHEA, Florida State University: Thank you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I think a lot of our viewers have this stereotype that a gap year is for rich kids to put on a backpack and travel around Europe and find themselves. I know that's not totally true, so, tell us, what is a gap year?
JOSEPH O'SHEA: Sure.
There are so many misconceptions about what a gap year is, and some people think it's just waiting around in your home community, maybe sitting on your parents' couch, taking a year off from school.
But we think of gap year as something very different, a very powerful educational experience. It's a structured, deliberate and purposeful experience, in which students challenge themselves outside their comfort zones. Often it involves traveling or working or interning, sometimes overseas, sometimes domestically, but it's designed as an experience that accelerates their personal growth and prepares them for college.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, could you give me some examples of actual gap year activities that kids are doing now?
JOSEPH O'SHEA: Sure.
So, City Year, for instance, one in the U.S. in which students — or young people work in inner-city schools, is a powerful one, and popular one. Many students go overseas. An organization Global Citizen Year, for instance, or Omprakash work with local community-based organizations in developing communities around the world.
And students will intern there. Maybe they're doing something with young people or a community role or public health kind of work. But it really runs the spectrum.
SUMMARY: Monday marks the first full year since ISIS declared the "Caliphate" -- an Islamic State -- part of the justification for its terror campaign across the Middle East. A new study from Fordham University has uncovered an increase in the number of Americans arrested for allegedly supporting ISIS. The Director of Fordham's Center on National Security, Karen Greenberg, joins Hari Sreenivasan with more.
HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Monday marks the first full year since ISIS declared the caliphate, an Islamic State, part of the justification for its terror campaign across the Middle East.
Just this week, ISIS claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in Tunisia and Kuwait, and is suspected of an attack in France.
The Justice Department has estimated at least 2,700 Westerners have traveled to join ISIS in the fighting in Syria, including some from the U.S.
Now, a new study from Fordham University Law School shows arrests in the U.S. for allegedly supporting ISIS are growing. Since last March of 2014, federal prosecutors have charged 56 people for supporting ISIS. Law enforcement killed three other suspects.
Fordham researchers say most of the accused are U.S. citizens. More than 60 percent of those charged are 21 or younger, and more than 80 percent of the cases involved recruitment with social media.
I’m joined now by the head of that study, the Director of Fordham’s Center on National Security, Karen Greenberg.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally tonight, building bridges across the generation gap and the technology divide.
The “NewsHour's” Mary Jo Brooks has our report.
COURTNEY KERSHAW: You got it?
DOROTHY STONE: Yes. Yes.
COURTNEY KERSHAW: You work out for the day?
(LAUGHTER)
MARY JO BROOKS (NewsHour): Twice a week, 24-year-old Courtney Kershaw and 89-year-old Dorothy Stone head out on errands. On the day we visited, there was a trip to the nail salon and the grocery store.
Kershaw works for Denver-based concierge business called Capable Living, which provide services for senior citizens who live in their own home. Fees start at $1,000 a month. What’s unique is that the employees are all young people, so-called millennials who were born at the end of the last century.
The goal of the company is not only to provide services, but to build bridges between a generation obsessed with smartphones and selfies with one that was raised in an entirely different era.
COURTNEY KERSHAW: Some of my favorite things were you telling me about when you were my age and how you would fill up the car for 10 cents and go driving around all day.
SUMMARY: Many of the now-daily protests on race and justice are being led by young people frustrated by recent grand jury decisions in Ferguson and New York City. Gwen Ifill gets perspectives from protester Molly Greiber, Tory Russell of Hands Up United, and Jessica Pierce of the Black Youth Project on what’s driving them personally and the movement at large.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last month cast a harsh spotlight on how a majority black city came to have so few black law enforcement officers. In fact, in many communities around the country, police, fire and paramedic services remain predominantly white, no matter what the communities they protect look like.
In Oakland, California, a new effort is under way to change those statistics, and give young men of color new career opportunities.
Sarah Varney of Kaiser Health News collaborated with the NewsHour on this report.
SARAH VARNEY, Kaiser Health News: Twenty-two-year-old Dexter Harris, who lives with his aunt near Oakland, California, is getting ready for a 12-hour shift as an emergency medical technician, or EMT, an entry-level job in the paramedic field.
Harris works full-time and supports himself and some of his family members. But when he was younger, his life was headed in a very different direction.
DEXTER HARRIS: I just thought I could just run around in the streets and make a living off that. If you grew up like me, my house — home was kind of rocky. You didn’t have somebody telling you, oh, you can be whatever you want to be. You could be a doctor. You could be a lawyer. So you kind of start just looking up to the wrong people.
SARAH VARNEY: Harris spent nine months in a juvenile detention center when he was 17, a common experience for many young men of color in Alameda County, which includes Oakland.
Here, black and Latino youth account for nearly 90 percent of those detained in juvenile hall. And school dropout and unemployment rates for that population are among the highest in the country. But while he was in juvenile hall, Harris’ life took a dramatic turn when he was recruited for a new county program that not only trained him how to be an EMT, but profoundly altered what he thought he could do with his life.
WOMAN: Come on.
MAN: One, two, three, four, five, six.
SARAH VARNEY: The program is called EMS Corps. And on a recent afternoon, 25 students in the current class were practicing basic life support skills under the watchful eye of instructor Maria Garcina (ph).
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): High atop Central Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountains, these students are continuing work begun 75 years ago.
They have been renovating the Skyland Stables, which for generations have provided national park visitors with horses to ride along 200 miles of equestrian trails. This is the pilot project of the Hands-On Preservation Experience, or HOPE Crew, a new nationwide initiative from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Monica Rhodes is its volunteer coordinator.
MONICA RHODES, National Trust for Historic Preservation: What the National Trust hopes to bring to this — through this new initiative is an opportunity for a younger, more diverse audience to get involved with these buildings, to really interact with their environment and contribute to their country.
JEFFREY BROWN: The Trust is partnering with the National Park Service, the Corps Network and other groups to bring a new generation into the preservation fold across the country.
Editor's Note: This op-ed was co-published with The New York Times. It is not subject to our Creative Commons license.
The national furor over concussions misses the primary scourge that is harming kids and damaging youth sports in America.
The heightened pressure on child athletes to be, essentially, adult athletes has fostered an epidemic of hyperspecialization that is both dangerous and counterproductive.
One New York City soccer club proudly advertises its development pipeline for kids under age 6, known as U6. The coach-picked stars, "poised for elite level soccer," graduate to the U7 "pre-travel" program. Parents, visions of scholarships dancing in their heads, enable this by paying for private coaching and year-round travel.
Children are playing sports in too structured a manner too early in life on adult-size fields—i.e., too large for optimal skill development—and spending too much time in one sport. It can lead to serious injuries and, a growing body of sports science shows, a lesser ultimate level of athletic success.
We should urge kids to avoid hyperspecialization and instead sample a variety of sports through at least age 12.
Nearly a third of youth athletes in a three-year longitudinal study led by Neeru Jayanthi, director of primary care sports medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, were highly specialized—they had quit multiple sports in order to focus on one for more than eight months a year—and another third weren't far behind. Even controlling for age and the total number of weekly hours in sports, kids in the study who were highly specialized had a 36 percent increased risk of suffering a serious overuse injury. Dr. Jayanthi saw kids with stress fractures in their backs, arms or legs; damage to elbow ligaments; and cracks in the cartilage in their joints.
Because families with greater financial resources were better able to facilitate the travel and private coaching that specialization requires, socioeconomic status turned up as a positive predictor of serious injury. Some young athletes now face surgeries befitting their grandparents. Young hockey goaltenders repeatedly practice butterfly style—which stresses the developing hip joint when the legs are splayed to block the bottom of the goal. The sports surgeon Marc Philippon, based in Vail, Colo., saw a 25-year-old goalie who already needed a hip replacement.
In the Loyola study, sport diversification had a protective effect. But in case health risks alone aren't reason enough for parents to ignore the siren call of specialization, diversification also provides performance benefits.
Kids who play multiple "attacking" sports, like basketball or field hockey, transfer learned motor and anticipatory skills—the unconscious ability to read bodies and game situations—to other sports. They take less time to master the sport they ultimately choose.
Several studies on skill acquisition now show that elite athletes generally practiced their sport less through their early teenage years and specialized only in the mid-to-late teenage years, while so-called sub-elites—those who never quite cracked the highest ranks—homed in on a single sport much sooner.
Data presented at the April meeting of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine showed that varsity athletes at U.C.L.A.—many with full scholarships—specialized on average at age 15.4, whereas U.C.L.A. undergrads who played sports in high school, but did not make the intercollegiate level, specialized at 14.2.
We may prize the story of Tiger Woods, who demonstrated his swing at age 2 for Bob Hope. But the path of the two-time N.B.A. M.V.P. Steve Nash (who grew up playing soccer and didn't own a basketball until age 13) or the tennis star Roger Federer (whose parents encouraged him to play badminton, basketball, and soccer) is actually the norm.
A Swedish study of sub-elite and elite tennis players—including five who ranked among the top 15 in the world—found that those who topped out at as sub-elites dropped all other sports by age 11. Eventual elites developed in a "harmonious club environment without greater demands for success," and played multiple sports until age 14.
The sports science data support a "sampling period" through at least age 12. Mike Joyner, a Mayo Clinic physician and human performance expert, would add general physical literacy-building to the youth sports menu: perhaps using padded gymnastics gyms for parkour, which is essentially running, climbing or vaulting on any obstacle one can find.
In addition to athletic diversity, kids' sports should be kid-size.
In Brazil, host of this month's World Cup, kids are weaned on "futsal," a lightly structured and miniaturized form of soccer. Futsal is played on tiny patches of grass or concrete or on indoor courts and typically by teams of five players.
Players touch the ball up to five times as frequently as they do in traditional soccer, and the tighter playing area forces children to develop foot and decision-making skills under pressure.
A futsalization of youth sports generally would serve engagement, skill development and health.
USA Hockey (which has barred checking in youth games) recently invited adults to play on a 310-by-130-foot ice rink to show them what it's like for an 8-year-old to play on a regulation rink. The grown-ups' assessments: "Too much time between the action"; "it's hard to communicate because everyone is spread out so far"; "you end up spending a lot of time in open space."
Futsal, basketball and padded parkour? Sounds like a strange three-sport athlete, and a perfect model for kids.
Russian troops were rolling through Crimea when Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff and a foreign policy expert, was deployed on a mission to do media outreach. But the focus of Mr. McDonough’s calls to local talk radio stations was not geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe, it was health care.
Mr. McDonough chatted with Andy Baskin and Jeff Phelps, hosts of a popular sports talk radio program on WKRK-FM (92.3) in Cleveland, about the coming N.F.L. draft, basketball at the White House and his days playing college football in Minnesota. Mr. McDonough then pitched a new website featuring games, videos and superstar athletes explaining the benefits of health insurance: a sports-themed portal to HealthCare.gov.
“We’ve all seen it happen,” said Mr. McDonough, promoting the portal, GamePlan4Me, to the hosts of “Baskin & Phelps” and their mostly young, mostly male audience. “Somebody’s playing hoops, and they blow out a knee or something. And then all of a sudden, if you don’t have health care, you’re going to bankrupt yourself.”
Persuading millions of young people — especially African-Americans and Latinos — to buy insurance using HealthCare.gov is consuming every spare moment at the White House as President Obama and his aides race against a March 31 deadline, when enrollment ends for the year. They are waging their final public relations push with a zeal that underscores how critical success is for Mr. Obama’s political legacy, and how far behind they remain.
Officials have scaled back their original estimate of signing up seven million people, to six million. But according to enrollment figures released Monday, more than one million sign-ups will be needed to reach the reduced goal by the end of March. And there is concern that the administration still needs a larger proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds, the young and presumably healthy people whom insurance companies need as customers in order to keep premiums reasonable for everyone.
In an effort to reach young men, the White House is trying to turn March Madness into a frenzy about health care coverage as well as basketball. Mr. Obama’s N.C.A.A. tournament bracket, released on Wednesday, was accompanied by a “16 Sweetest Reasons to Get Covered” bracket. LeBron James, the Miami Heat star forward, is starring in 30-second ads promoting HealthCare.gov that will air during the college basketball games.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama will urge daytime TV viewers to sign up for coverage in an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” from the White House. In the past three weeks, Mr. Obama has met with YouTube personalities in the Roosevelt Room, hosting some of the younger generation’s online favorites: a science geek, a drunken chef and an Obama impersonator. He dialed into Rickey Smiley’s hip-hop radio show and sat down in the Diplomatic Reception Room for separate interviews with the comedian Zach Galifianakis and a health care expert from WebMD.
“We are going to leave no stone unturned,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president and the leader of the White House public engagement office, which is coordinating the Affordable Care Act effort. “Our goal is to meet people where they are.”
Michelle Obama, the first lady, urged people to sign up in an appearance at a health center in a black neighborhood in Miami, and made the pitch on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. plugged the health care site at Mary Mac’s Tea Room in Atlanta.
From January until the end of March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the HealthCare.gov site and administers the Affordable Care Act, will have spent $52 million on paid media, officials said. Conservative opponents of the law have concentrated their spending on ads focusing on Democratic candidates and sowing doubts about the viability of the law.
The final push comes at a time when the administration is juggling other priorities. On March 6, at the height of the crisis in Ukraine, Mr. Obama spoke on the phone with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for an hour before going across town to urge Latinos to enroll during a town-hall-style meeting at a museum broadcast on three Spanish-language television networks. He returned to the White House a couple of hours later to announce the first sanctions on Russia.
“We’ve organized our outreach in a way so we can take care of the non-A.C.A. business that needs to be taken care of while devoting a great deal of time and energy to this effort,” Ms. Jarrett said.
Outside of Washington, the president’s allies are staging a final surge to enroll as many people as possible.
The targets in the last few days of the campaign are young people and minorities, with a particular focus on Hispanic and black youths — two crucial groups that are more likely to be underinsured, officials said. On a conference call last week with almost 3,000 pastors, Mr. Obama declared it “crunchtime” and asked them to do whatever they could do to urge members of their churches to sign up.
At a small church in the Tampa, Fla., neighborhood of Sulphur Springs, the Rev. Timothy Wynn took up the challenge on Sunday. In front of about 50 parishioners, he delivered a sermon that combined his religious guidance with a pitch for insurance.
“I know you came here for the word of God, and I’m going to give you the word of God,” he said. But before delivering that word, the pastor asked his parishioners, most of whom are black, to take out their cellphones and text friends to remind them to come to the church and sign up. He also asked them to go to the church’s Facebook page and “like” an open-enrollment flier there.
“Can you do that for me?” he said. “God not only cares about our spiritual being, he cares about our physical being as well.”
At the back of the church, All Nations Outreach Center, two health care “navigators” were positioned at tables with stickers and information pamphlets about how to sign up. At the end of the service, about 10 people stopped to ask questions.
Tiffany Pate, 33, a hairstylist in Brandon, Fla., who was the sole person to enroll on site, said that while she already had health insurance, her new plan would save her $50 a month. “It made sense,” she said of the switch.
In addition to trying to galvanize clergy and black mayors around the country, the Obama administration has been working hard to attract African-Americans and Hispanics through such media efforts as interviews on popular black and Hispanic radio programs like “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” and “Erazno y La Chokolata,” a Spanish-language program based in Los Angeles. It has also begun social media campaigns in English and Spanish and hosted Google chats.
“People get busy in their daily lives,” Ms. Jarrett said. “But as you approach a deadline, it’s easier to get people’s attention and say, ‘OK, come on now, you only have a few weeks left. It’s time to get serious about this, go on the website, explore your options and sign up.’ ”
Though the administration is spending heavily on airtime, it is also courting unpaid endorsements that might go viral on the Internet. In late February, nine stars of hit YouTube videos were invited to a conversation about health care at the White House. Among them was Michael Stevens, the star of “Vsauce,” a popular video show about science that regularly gets millions of views online.
“The 15- to 35-year-old group is the heart of my audience,” Mr. Stevens said in an interview. “The White House made it clear they want to talk to everyone.”
His wonky videos ask questions like “Why do we kiss?” and “What if you were born in space?” He is working on a special video about the science of assessing risk — and the need for insurance.
Another YouTube star at the meeting was Hannah Hart, whose show “My Drunk Kitchen” is irreverent and hugely popular. An episode about making a grilled cheese sandwich while tipsy has gotten more than three million views, and a brunch episode, during which Ms. Hart repeatedly downs mimosas as she cooks pancakes and eggs, has gotten two million. In a video she made after leaving the White House meeting, Ms. Hart plugged the president’s website for her viewers.
“If you want to show your body that you love yourself, go ahead and sign up for health insurance at HealthCare.gov,” she said.
“I’m simply talking to all my friends who are independent business professionals who think they are going to live forever,” she continued. “Get covered!”
Since it was posted on March 4, her video has been seen about 250,000 times.
SUMMARY: The geography of the job market has changed in the past decade. Jobs typically held by teens are now being filled by older workers. In Boston, some organizations are trying to mobilize America's unemployed youth and bring them into the professional labor market. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Finally tonight, we turn to politics and a look at the impact of the youth vote in this year's presidential election. In 2008, young people went to the polls in record numbers, with 66 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds supporting President Obama, helping to sweep him to victory.
But, this year, the president's support among that age group dipped to 60 percent, although young voters proved much more critical to his re-election win.
That's the subject of a new analysis by the Pew Research Center. And we are joined now by Michael Dimock, one of the study's lead authors.
And, Michael, there were confident predictions before Election Day that youth was simply not engaged, not enthusiastic, and not going to show up on Election Day.
What really happened?
RAY SUAREZ: When we try to slice and dice the electorate, is there really a youth vote? Because every youth is something else? They come from their region, they come from their state. They're well-educated or not-so-well. They're high-income or low-income. They come from different racial and ethnic groups.
Is a youth voter more like another youth voter than they are like other Catholics, other Southerners?
MICHAEL DIMOCK, Pew Research Center: Right. No, it's true.
This is a diverse generation, as any generation is. Baby boomers were characterized as something, while they're very diverse.
All the generations have differences, but this generation really has a character that showed up early on, even before Obama came into the scene and energized people.
In the 2004 election, this was an engaged electorate that was already showing its Democratic leanings. And that's not just about personalities. It's about substance. They have somewhat different values about what they prioritize and what they think the government should be doing.
This is the one age group that wants the government to do more, whereas all the older age groups want the government to get out of their hair. This is the one generation that backs the health care reform and is much more liberal, not surprisingly, on some social issues like gay marriage or immigration.
Those fundamentals are part of the character of this generation. There's hardly uniform agreement within the generation, but it is a characteristic that really sets this age group apart.
While many young people across the country have been watching the 2012 presidential election unfold via political ads, Daily Show parodies and social media, aspiring journalists with the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs program have been producing election stories from within their own communities.
Students at Richwood High School in West Virginia produced a video (at bottom) about how economic pressures, campaign rhetoric and recent changes in the coal industry influenced attitudes towards the presidential election. The students explored unique angles of the story, including how energy policies affect families and expectations about the future in the Appalachian region.
Students from Fort Mill High School in South Carolina, Free Spirit Media in Chicago, Ill., and the Media Enterprise Alliance in Oakland, Calif., interviewed their peers about the future of democracy. Watch their answers to the question: "Do you think the political system is broken? If so, how would you fix it?"
SUMMARY: A policy change by the Obama administration opened the doors for certain young, undocumented immigrants to come forward in order to avoid or defer deportation, and thousands of people have flocked in response. WTTW's Paris Schutz reports from Chicago, and Judy Woodruff talks to Brian Bennett of the Los Angeles Times.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Next, the story of young undocumented immigrants anxious to stay in the United States.
Yesterday was the first day they could apply for deportation waivers under changes announced by President Obama earlier this summer. Under the new program, young illegals will not be deported if they were brought to the United States before age 16 and have remained for at least five years without leaving, if they are under the age of 30 with no criminal history. And they must have a U.S. high school diploma or its equivalent or have served in the U.S. military.
Thousands of immigrants flooded their local offices yesterday.
Paris Schutz of WTTW Chicago reports on the scene there.
SUMMARY: Tens of millions of Chinese villagers have moved to the cities in China, but they find living conditions harsh and establishing meaningful relations difficult. Because of the Household Registration System, they have fewer rights than those born in the cities. Sharron Lovell from our partner GlobalPost reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): ....Making a move from the country to the big city, it's a cultural shift well known in many Western societies, and now it's becoming common for young Chinese men and women, too.
SUMMARY: Part of a project produced by the Kennedy Center and singer-songwriter John Legend called What's Going On Now, young people across the country are using media, music and inspiration from Marvin Gaye to address issues in their lives and communities such as the economy, wars and the environment. Jeffrey Brown reports.
KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN, GlobalPost: From clothes to coffee, to food and movies, Western culture is big and getting bigger in China. KFC is the country's most popular restaurant chain. A Buick is the top-selling car.
At a public square in Beijing, 35-year-old Hou Xiazhou and friends show off moves they learned from watching their American idols on the Internet.
HOU XIAZHOU, skateboarder (through translator): The West influences us a great deal. For example, those of us who skateboard now are all learning from the West, from America. We watch how their professional skateboarders practice, and imitate their methods. The way they dress influences how we dress. We imitate how they skateboard. Watching them inspires us to think about how skateboarding should be.
KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN: Western culture swept into China when the country opened to foreign trade 30 years ago. Western brands and ideas have exploded in the past decade, as economic boom expanded the country's middle class.
Now the government is pushing back. President Hu Jintao says China's culture is being infiltrated by hostile Western forces. And the government has set new limits on Chinese mass media. First, they issued edicts that killed some racy and wildly popular TV shows and pushed others out of prime time.
