The New York Times Sunday ran a piece by Pam Belluck reporting that some countries have lowered the voting age to sixteen and asking whether such a move would be a good idea here in the US, as some legislators have proposed. The writer’s approach to the story was essentially to find a few fat fish, let them loose in a old open-ended barrel and to then start blasting away. It’s like an Onion headline screaming the obvious: “New York Times doesn’t think American teens ready to vote.”

The first graph mocks an imagined sixteen-year-old voter as preoccupied with “High School Musical,” instant messaging, and dates at burger joints—not an enlightening picture of youth, of course, but not really amusing either. Failing both to inform and amuse, isn’t that the most heinous of all journalistic failures?

In the end, the article takes the view of a quoted Johns Hopkins professor: “Hardly anybody [that age] votes. They’re in a state of flux. They’re growing up.”

To quickly respond:

1) The article starts from a shallow definition of politics. If politics is about power, which it is—about having a say in shaping your life—then power is negotiated all around, not just as a matter of electoral politics. In fact, by almost any measure, electoral politics falls way down the list of the spaces of real everyday power negotiation. Young people are constantly engaged in making their realities more acceptable—at school, at their jobs, with their parents and peers. Their negotiations are constant and intense if measured by those met every day by people over forty. It’s the struggles of young people that provide the fodder for all the best music and movies and books! In the words of punk Dead Boy Stiv Bators: “The sun will rise for me. Then I’ll be ten feet tall. And you’ll be nothing at all. Sonic reducer. Ain’t no loser!”

2) Next, youth, the article should have noted, are systematically excluded from campaign politics, so their “politicalness” should not be assessed by their propensity to vote. They can’t vote. So why would they think about politics in terms of voting? They wouldn’t; that is, they don’t. That’s one of the things the advocates of lowering the voting age would like to change. Young people act politically and think politically outside of the voting system by training, by necessity. That way of acting and thinking doesn’t change immediately upon turning eighteen.

3) Besides, isn’t volunteering political? Isn’t going to shows? Isn’t listening to hip-hop or goth or pop music political? Is turning away from network news in favor of The Onion and Jon Stewart not political?

4) Which brings me to my last point for now: Wouldn’t it be better to assess youth politics through popculture activity, by sorting out the meaning embedded in the media consumption and practice of young people—the entertainment preferences, their instant messaging ways, their dating venues of choice—all of that which is being ridiculed here by the Times as mere distraction?

Of course that would be a more difficult story to write. Collin Rice, the stereotypically brainy ten-year-old from Minnesota at the end of the piece, doesn’t have the market on how to be a political teenager. In fact, he may well be engaged in a lot less politics every day than most kids his age.