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Children as young as 5 have shown to already have a basic understanding of presidents and elections. In the midst of a heated presidential election, political coverage and commentary can feel unavoidable. Kids are not immune — they might be picking up information about the race from the adults in their lives, at recess, or on social media. As much as parents may think their children are oblivious, research shows kids, including very young ones, are paying attention. One study found that nearly all of the surveyed kids between the ages of 5 and 11 could name the candidates running for president in 2016.  “Kids as young as kindergarten and first grade can name candidates when they see their pictures,” says Erin Pahlke, an associate professor of psychology at Whitman College and a co-author of the study, “and they have a sense of what the candidates believe.” You don’t have to have an in-depth discussion with your child every time they encounter a political topic. When it comes to political conversations with kids, experts say you should answer their questions about the civic process and quell any fears they may have — but avoid telling them how to think. When kids are young, teach them about civic engagement Since children as young as 5 are shown to already have a basic understanding of presidents and elections, you can use this early exposure to guide and inform their knowledge. Kids of all ages can learn about civic engagement through activities like mock elections in school or accompanying their parents to the polls on Election Day, says clinical psychologist Melissa Goldberg Mintz, author of Has Your Child Been Traumatized? How to Know and What to do to Promote Healing and Recovery.  You can use this experience to teach kids how elections work. Children as young as 5 can grasp that voters are choosing between two major candidates from opposite parties and for laws that affect where they live, Pahlke says. If an elementary school-aged child has particular interests — maybe they love trains and buses — you could explain how proposed legislation would impact transportation in your city or town, Goldberg Mintz says. But don’t get too in the weeds or too prescriptive. “Something we would not want to do,” she says, “is talk about ‘With global climate change and increasing natural disasters, our city is doomed if we don’t have these protective flood measures.’” Allow kids to lead the dialogue Although children are exposed to more political information than their parents realize, their understanding or the conclusions they draw is sometimes incorrect, Pahlke says. Parents have a responsibility to clear up these misunderstandings, she continues, so ask your kids what they know about certain topics. Watching or reading the news together can be an effective way to start a conversation, says Nicole Caporino, an associate professor of psychology at American University. If any stories trigger fear or confusion, you can discuss the likelihood that their fears will materialize, point out hopeful news stories, and assure them the family will cope with any potential challenges together, Caporino says. Caporino’s research has suggested that most children and adolescents were worried about political issues. Don’t downplay their concerns, Goldberg Mintz says. Do your best to give them an honest answer, but try not to give into fear or negativity, even if you are feeling scared. You might say, “I hear that you’re worried about that, and I have some concerns too. But we’ll figure out ways to get through it if that happens.”  Parents should open the door to these conversations, because chances are children might already be thinking about these topics, Pahlke says. However, you shouldn’t offer up too many details if your child isn’t interested. For example, if you ask your elementary-aged kid, “The presidential election is coming up. Have you heard anything?” and they don’t have a strong opinion or say they haven’t talked about it with their friends, you can leave it at that.  “We don’t ever want to volunteer bloody details or gory information that kids don’t already know about,” Goldberg Mintz says. “We want to be a trustworthy source for them. And if we don’t know the answer, we want to show them how to get to a trustworthy source.” Teens who are closer to voting age can handle discussions about specific policies, Pahlke says, and parents can explain various perspectives and potential outcomes. Parents can also talk with their teens about the importance of voting, Goldberg Mintz says. Encourage them to fact-check what they see on social media Teens are increasingly turning to social media to stay informed, with one 2022 survey finding that half of Gen Z adolescents source their news from online platforms. If your kid asks you a question about something they’ve seen on social media (or sounds as if it originated there), use this as an opportunity to fact-check those claims with them. Check sources like AP Fact Check, Politifact, and Snopes and show them where they can find trusted reporting. To determine a source’s credibility, the News Literacy Project recommends quickly researching the source of your news, determining if the organization has ethical standards, and assessing the quality of the outlet’s other coverage.  “We don’t ever want to volunteer bloody details or gory information that kids don’t already know about.” If your teen doesn’t come to you directly with what they’ve been watching online, you might need to gently broach the conversation. In the case of viral disinformation campaigns, you can ask your child, “Did you see people talking about this on social media?” This way you can glean information about what your kid is seeing online and correct any inaccuracies. Let them come to their own conclusions High schoolers will have more nuanced understandings about certain current events and policies and it’s appropriate to discuss these topics with them, Pahlke says. But rather than paint various candidates or points of view as “good” or “bad,” help them consider different perspectives. Explain why people with various experiences would have different opinions on a topic. It’s fine if they align with a particular candidate or policy, but they should also be able to see where the other side is coming from. Perspective-taking can help them in other relationships, too, Pahlke says. Teens may also have a clear understanding of their personal values and can reflect on how certain candidates or policies reflect these values and goals, Goldberg Mintz says. You can show your teen where to find credible information from trusted news sources on specific candidates and policies and let them make up their minds. “Rather than trying to get in the weeds about ‘This is the candidate that our family can support, and it’s because XYZ’ is trying to define a kid’s beliefs for them,” Goldberg Mintz says. “We let our kids come to their own decisions.”

My name is Stitches and I approve this farewell message. The long and winding road. … Stick a fork in us. We’re done. Hope you enjoyed the ride.

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What happens when the owner of one of the most important news organizations in the country decides that the journalists are the problem? That’s the question I keep asking myself in response to Jeff Bezos’s op-ed explaining his decision to have his newspaper, The Washington Post, stop making presidential endorsements just days before it was reportedly set to formally back Vice President Kamala Harris.Bezos argued that the press needs to accept reality about its unpopularity, and implied that journalists are to blame for our sinking reputation. He didn’t even acknowledge the concerted, multiyear campaign—led most recently by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel—to convince Americans that the free press is, to borrow a phrase, the “enemy of the people.” Bezos writes, “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased … It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”Not once did Bezos even try to explain why it is that “most people believe the media is biased.”The decision to get out of the presidential-endorsement game itself is not problematic to me. In fact, I’ve always felt sorry for any working journalist who has to cover a candidate’s campaign the day after its opinion page comes out against that candidate. As NBC’s political director, I had to deal with analogous situations over the years, when campaigns refused to grant interviews to or even interact with NBC journalists because they didn’t like an opinion that was aired on MSNBC’s more ideological or partisan programs. For reporters who are simply trying to do their job—covering a campaign, reporting what’s happening, and writing the most factually accurate account of the day that they can confirm by deadline—it’s not a comfortable position to be in.[Ellen Cushing: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]For years, I pushed NBC to invest in a conservative talk-show lineup on CNBC. I wanted to be able to say: We have a red cable channel at night and a blue cable channel at night, but here at NBC, we are stuck covering politics as it is, not as we wish it was. Covering politics as it is continues to be my mantra. Those who want to push their own politics should leave reporting and become activists; there are plenty of places where they can do that.The real problem with what Bezos did was not the decision he made, but its timing and execution—rolled out on the eve of an election with little explanation. And then, when he did publish an explanation, he somehow made things worse. There are many legitimate criticisms of contemporary journalism, but Bezos didn’t level any of them. Instead, he wrote that media outlets suffer from a “lack of credibility” because they “talk only to a certain elite.” He betrayed no awareness that he was parroting a right-wing talking point, revealing his ignorance of the 50-year campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press—which arguably began when conservative supporters of President Richard Nixon vowed revenge for the media’s exposure of the Watergate crimes.What Bezos failed to acknowledge is that a legion of right-wing critics—most notably the longtime Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes—spent decades attacking media outlets, repeating the charge that they are irredeemably biased. For Ailes and others, it proved a lucrative approach—when you hear something over and over, you tend to believe it. Trump and his team have used the same strategy, building their appeal by attacking the press. Social-media algorithms have only made this repetitive, robotic attack on the press worse.But instead of defending his reporters against such attacks, Bezos decided to blame the victim in his extremely defensive op-ed. He is right to note that “complaining is not a strategy.” But neither is surrender. Six years ago, I argued in The Atlantic that media outlets had made a mistake by failing to respond to their critics. Many journalists feared that fighting back against bad-faith attacks on our work would make us look partisan. So instead, we chose not to engage when partisan actors at Fox News or campaign operatives used the charge of media bias against working journalists. And I wrote that this needed to change.I thought that if journalists defended their work, at a minimum, the owners of media institutions would have our back. Boy, was that naive. It turns out that Bezos himself has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise. His op-ed must have felt like a gut punch to reporters at the Post. Only in its final lines did he say that the journalists he employs deserve to be believed.To Bezos’s credit, he has at least put his name on an op-ed and attempted a defense of his actions. The leaders of the publicly traded companies that happen to own major news organizations have not had the guts to explain publicly—either to the employees they’ve laid off or the ones they’ve kept—why they’ve decided to either “Trump-proof” their companies or to shrink their commitment to the news-and-information business.And if you haven’t been paying attention to the accelerating contraction of major news organizations, just wait until the first quarter of the coming year, when many publicly traded companies may decide that news divisions aren’t worth the headaches they cause their CEOs. These companies have plenty of cash to help sustain their news divisions while they find their footing in the new media landscape. The fact they are choosing not to do so says a lot.Part of me understands the logic of much of corporate America. The idea that Trump could use the power of the government to punish companies for journalism he dislikes is not hypothetical. Amazon alleges that he did this once already—interfering with the award of a $10 billion defense contract—because the Post’s tough reporting made the president see Bezos as his “political enemy.” Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ investment. If that means accepting the terms of coercion by Trump, apparently, so be it.Bezos could have made the case that The Washington Post is not a partisan institution, but instead, he argued that journalists have to accept the perception of media bias as our reality. If that’s what we have to do, then perhaps Bezos should either sell the Post or put it in some sort of blind trust. Because he has created the perception—among both the public and his own employees—that his other business interests influenced his decision not to raise Trump’s ire with a Harris endorsement.Bezos, who owns the space company Blue Origin, is in a rich-guy race with Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, to become the leader in commercial space exploration. That Musk has become Trump’s chief surrogate, and a leading financier of his campaign, must surely have made folks at Blue Origin nervous. Perhaps that’s why Blue Origin executives secured a meeting with Trump before the election. The timing of their meeting—the same day the Post made its no-more-endorsements announcement—only adds to the perception problem facing Bezos. But in the same op-ed in which he told his journalists that they needed to accept perceptions as reality, he insisted that the perception of a quid pro quo was wrong, and that he hadn’t known about the meeting beforehand.[Robert Greene: Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris]By Bezos’s own logic, how are the journalists at the Post supposed to be able to get out from under the perception that Bezos is hopelessly biased? What about readers? Do they now have to assume that the Post’s politics are Bezos’s politics?I’m sorry that Bezos has not brought the same energy, focus, and innovation to the Post that he brought to Amazon. The man who built the “everything store” could have developed the Post into an “everything portal,” a model for information sharing. If he wanted to foster ideological diversity, he could have purchased multiple publications, each with its own editorial board. Instead, he apparently decided he wanted a trophy. And now that trophy has gotten in the way of another ambition—becoming a commercial space pioneer.What chance do journalists have to regain public confidence if the person who owns one of the most important media institutions in the world doesn’t have the first clue about the long-standing campaign to delegitimize the very publication he owns?Whatever the public perception, the reality is that most journalists, across the country, show up at work each day determined to be fair, honest, and direct. That’s what their readers expect of one another, and they should expect the same of the people who report the news they consume.If only Jeff Bezos understood that.

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