The news in recent years about civic education and engagement in American society has been dismal, and particularly so when it comes to young people’s attention to serious news. All but the most cynical critics would agree that a ready supply of high-quality news and information is essential for our democracy to work, and that, for the moment, we have devised no better way to produce this than our traditional news outlets.

Yet today’s teens and young adults are growing up in a society in which the concept of “journalism” has been distorted by decades of anti-press propaganda that reduces all of journalism to an elitist cabal that pushes a left-wing agenda, consciously or not. (More recently, the left’s critique of the press as a cowardly corporate stooge has been no less simplistic.) They are growing up, too, in the bosom of “the media,” an undiscriminating conception of our communication environment that facilitates a blurring of the line between entertainment and journalism.

In his recent book, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens, Peter Levine, the director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, focuses on reforming the press as an institution, rather than trying to convince young people to value journalism, as a strategy for reversing their disengagement from serious news.

But it seems to us that both strategies are necessary, and while the former is very much the subject of discussion and experimentation, the latter is not.

Not long ago, the Project for Excellence in Journalism explored the idea of a public-education campaign to teach people about the role of journalism in developing an informed citizenry. PEJ ultimately didn’t pursue the project, but Tom Rosenstiel, PEJ’s director, says if the major media companies got behind the...

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