When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I made a campaign poster for Mondale and hung it from a telephone pole. I was crushed that he lost.
By the 6th or 7th grade I was reading the main news section of the paper after reading the comics. By high school I was well conversant in what was going on day to day but didn’t have any real strong political opinions. By college I was more politically interested. That was 20-odd years ago.
I remember the '72 election and being disappointed by McGovern’s loss. I was very aware of Watergate, but I don’t think I understood it very well. I was 8.
I followed the Carter/Ford contest, and tepidly supported Ford. We’re Jews, and I found Carter’s overt Christianity mildly discomfiting.
I was a senior in high school for the '80 elections. For the required US Government class, the entire senior class was divided into groups of 4 or 5. Each group had to do summaries of state-by-state polling data (and local news reporting from each state about the election), and we held a mock convention where each group would vote for a candidate for each state, based on the polling research. As individuals, we could support whomever we wanted. The high school was in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, and that was the election that really cemented Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The class supported Reagan overwhelmingly. I supported John Anderson in his quixotic attempt at the presidency. Our overall prediction of a Reagan victory was very close to the actual outcome.
I thought Reagan would be a disaster, and following the news about his administration and watching the movement of the GOP to Crazy Town over the years has done nothing to change my mind on that. I’ve supported Democrats ever since, and still pay pretty close attention to political news.
In my Catholic family, having a Catholic president was an enormous and groundbreaking thing, so everything that JFK did was closely watched and endlessly analyzed. His assassination turned the entire family into rampant political activists, including the little pitcher with big ears (that would be me). Since Kennedy died when I was 7 years old, I guess my interest in politics began at about age 5.
I don’t remember not caring. It might have been because my siblings were so much older than me, but I’ve always followed politics and current events. I was born in 1966 so I remember the Vietnam war on TV and watching Nixon resign.
I used to play war journalist. I had this vest with a bunch of pockets and an old 35mm camera. I’d run around pretending I was covering various wars around the world. I was a weird kid.
Well, by the time I was 10 or so, I was always reading newspapers and news magazines, so I suppose I was interested in politics early. Of course, I didn’t always understand the issues, so I was constantly asking my Mom or my grandparents “What’s amnesty” or “What’s LSD” or “What’s inflation?”
Coincidentally, that interest led directly to my getting the Birds and the Bees talk. I read an editorial in the newspaper asking whether prostitution should be legalized. Naturally, I went to all my relatives and asked, “What’s prostitution?” Everyone told me to hush up, but a day or two later (my Dad being deceased), my uncle the cop got drafted to give me the facts of life. When the lecture was over, I still didn’t understand what prostitution was. When I finally got the idea, I couldn only wonder, “Why would anyone pay good money to do THAT???”
I think it was 1960 when I was 11 and the Nixon-Kennedy race was on. My sixth-grade teacher was a strong Nixon supporter; my father was a strong Kennedy supporter. My mother would not tell us kids, so we tested her feelings about things to try to figure it out.
Before I was 10, during the endgame in Vietnam.
My early 20s, Reagan’s first term.
17, in 1967, when it dawned on me that I might get drafted in a few months time. Catch-22 became my “Bible” shortly thereafter. (Still is.)
Is there an objective news site anyone can recommend? Is there anywhere that exists where viewers can get pertinent information without being subjected to embellishment, “expert opinions” or commentary? Somewhere viewers can get the who what when where and maybe the why? Anywhere that simply provides information in a brief manner without all the fluff?
I was interested in the news (radio and local paper) very early. I think I was reading the paper daily as soon as I could read easily. My interest was even heightened when my grandmother (who was raising me) got her first TV when I was 11. I was particularly interested in foreign news that were unfortunately sorely lacking in the local paper. Someone above mentioned National Geographic, I think I would really have loved a magazine of this kind as a kid. But the local paper was my only ressource as far as news (or even informations in general) go.
However, I had mostly no interest in politics at all. I began to be interested by it around 16.
Topic-drifting a bit; but, very similar situation for me at about the same age. I never got the “birds and bees” setting-straight from my parents (father died early, mother had various “issues”) – had to, in the end, put it together for myself, including blind alleys re misinformation from other kids…
We had when I was 10 / 11, a “mother’s help” type lady who lived with us – I’ll call her Miss D. She was rather prim and strait-laced, and religious, and had never married. I was an avid and precocious reader on assorted topics (just, anything political usually went right over my head). In a book about travels in Mexico, an issue tangentially related to prostitutes came up; I asked Miss D., who happened to be close by, “what’s a prostitute?” I was honestly not looking to embarrass the poor woman – was just sincerely curious, and very naïve. She was clearly most uncomfortable, and waffled about the matter: leaving me none the wiser, but aware that I had somehow dropped a brick.
There’s a lot of news! Whatever process puts the news in front of you, “embellished with fluff” or not, or decides what is “pertinent,” will be a source of bias. This will be especially true if you insist the news story be “brief.”
Click on a variety of sources and gradually learn which you consider to be “objective” 
I find Reuters and Csmonitor to be good, as well as some you might not expect: Aljazeera, Voanews, and Rt.
News.Google used to be a good starting point, with links to a variety of sources, but lately it seems to link mainly to the usual tired crowd: Cnn, Cbs, Fox, NYTimes, etc. – the ones that pay it money?
As I implied, I’ve been very surprised to find sources like Aljazeera and Rt to be hugely superior to the big American news sources. Try one and start a thread if you disagree.
I noticed that a couple of people mentioned Watergate and Vietnam, that was my experience too. One thing that occurred to me, is that when I was a kid during that period, the family got three newspapers delivered daily and we had one TV. So we all watched what was on. That meant that everyone, including the kids watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, every Sunday we all watched the 60 Minutes and we all watched documentaries like the World at War. If you wanted to watch TV, you pretty much watched what your parents were watching and that often meant watching the news.
I was an avid reader in my early teens (early 1960’s), reading Orwell, Huxley and much more, and was influenced by my mother who was somewhat active in (especially local) politics. I remember watching the 1964 GOP convention on TV and seeing Javits and Keating get booed. (I think my father voted Goldwater, mother LBJ; in the Nixon Administration they divorced.) I also vaguely remember listening to part of the 1960 Democratic Convention on our car radio. I tended to the left, partly in rebellion against my father who tended to the right. At my mother’s urging I even walked precincts. My late teens were the era of civil rights and Vietnam…
But I was always more interested in issues than in individual personalities. I paid almost no attention to Watergate. Over the years I focused on vocation, avocations, recreations and barely followed politics at all. I had studied economics and did remain interested in issues, but both the issues and the politics seemed (and still seem) completely irrelevant to my own life.
Good pay, investments and frugality led me to semi-retire in my mid-40’s and I had more time to follow the news. Malicious behavior by Gingrich, Starr etc. grabbed my attention. I’m still interested in issues, but increasingly American politics is less about issues and more about hypocrisy, corruption and malice. Unfortunately, to follow American politics these days is largely just to indulge in recreational outrage.
I remember watching the Political Conventions with my family–beginning with JFK. Usually with Huntley/Brinkley commenting, although Walter Cronkite was also good. There was a lot of political humor out, too. (We must have seen those comedians on the Tonight Show in the summer–when we got to stay up late.) And Mom subscribed to a bunch of magazines, including* Life* & Time; I read anything that came into the house.) We always watched the nightly news & Mom was an election judge before getting a Civil Service job.
Out in the world, my interest in politics & current events varied. I knew some folks sort of “radical” & others too far out to care. But who could ignore Nixon & Reagan? I voted more often than not.
The election debacle of 2000 sucked me in; I just couldn’t believe they were getting away with it. After Kerry’s defeat I lost some passion–but still voted. Right now, I’d love to ignore the Presidential stuff–that’s next year. There’s a local election coming up–for Mayor & an Equal Rights resolution that the righties hate…
I think there is a big difference between being involved and really being able to form a rational opinion on an issue.
For example, politicians and political activists LOVE to bring out children for their causes. Or maybe they have kids carrying signs or be in some parade.
But, do those kids really know what the issue is all about?
Many a kid has grown up and developed political ideas contrary to their parents.
In my mid-twenties. Based on certain events in my life, I suddenly had more free time and less people to hang out with. The 2012 election was ramping up, I joined a political campaign, and discovered that an interest in politics was a great topic of conversation. Granted, sometimes it’s an awful topic of conversation, because some (too many) people who care about politics get overly opinionated and make nasty comments about anyone who disagrees with them. But amidst those angry people are some intelligent people with whom I’ve been able to have great conversations because of our shared interest in politics.
Since I started reading the paper every day, at about age 13. Way back in 1975. I’d seen some major headlines (Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, Vietnam war, energy crisis I, etc.) for years before that, delivering the Philadelphia Inquirer every morning, but I guess I was too busy being a kid to care.
I can remember asking a lot of questions during the 1964 Presidential campaigns, trying to figure out why Goldwater, or LBJ, was so terrible, according to those who weren’t going to vote for him. Then I saw the civil rights movements of the 60 and the Viet Nam war, followed by Watergate. I remember when Biafra tried to secede, because we talked a lot about it at church.
I followed local and state news less closely. Stuff about natural disasters much less. Celebrity gossip and entertainment news I can only take in small doses. I read the newspapers fairly regularly when they were available, and I subscribed for many years after I got out of school. I don’t now - I have the Internet.
No such thing, I am afraid. All sources have a bias of one sort or another, even if it is which stories it will cover and how much coverage to give those stories. The best you can do is consume a variety of different sources, and learn to filter out the spin.
All news sources want you to read them, thus they are all going to be biased at least towards presenting “man bites dog” stories so that it looks like it happens more than it does, as well as that bad news is more interesting than good news. Hence the plethora of “New studies show that getting up in the morning causes cancer!” And a lot of stories, especially about technical subjects, are written by people who don’t understand the field.
And they sensationalize everything. They almost have to - a dryly factual presentation of facts causes the 50% of the populace whose IQ is below normal to lose interest after the first five words.
Welcome to the SDMB.
Regards,
Shodan