By Eric Newton and Susan Philliber

We hear a lot these days about how young people have tuned out, how they simply don’t care about the news.

Perhaps we shouldn’t believe everything we hear.

Teens actually are plugged into the news, according to the largest survey ever conducted of them, a $1 million, two-year project to canvas more than 100,000 high school students by University of Connecticut researchers David Yalof and Kenneth Dautrich.

The survey, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, made headlines earlier this year when it revealed that most of the kids didn’t know about or care about the First Amendment.

That was the sad news. But there also was some glad news: a telling statistic about youth news consumption. More than half — 57 percent of the teens, to be precise — said that they consume news from at least one source every day. More than three-quarters — 76 percent — said that they consume news from several sources every week.

In other words, to say that American youth are off news is like saying they’re off food. It just doesn’t make sense. They are eating more than ever. What they are consuming may not be good for them (but news nutrition is another and more complicated story).

For now, let’s get the basics right. Teens eat a lot of news. Where do they get this habit? From their parents. The survey said:

• Since nine of 10 parents got news from TV, seven of 10 kids did.
• Since seven of 10 parents got news from the radio, five of 10 kids did.
• Since six of 10 parents got their news from the newspaper, three of 10 kids did.

If the TV is on, your kids see it. If Newsweek is in the house, chances are greater that they’ll pick it up. If you leave NPR on, your children overhear it. The pattern is broken only by the Internet. Only 40 percent of the parents used it for news, but 44 percent of the teens did.

Other fascinating tidbits:

• Media use grows as teens age.
• Students with higher grades use all media sources with greater regularity.
• Students from high income families report more regular use of all news outlets than those from middle- or low-income families — except for television.

Serious scholars and earnest news executives have been telling us that young people are looking less at nightly newscasts and reading less of the daily newspaper — and, therefore, they don’t care about news.

Yet everyone is looking less at nightly newscasts. Everyone is reading less of the daily paper. It seems harder in these busy days to do anything that requires sitting still. But that doesn’t mean we are using news less. Virtually every form of news is booming: the web, books, free newspapers, ethnic papers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, TiVo, cell phones, Ipods, Blackberries, direct mail, e-mail, satellite — not to mention Bloggers. The only parts that are shrinking are the daily newspaper and the nightly network news broadcast.

America’s ability to both create and consume news has exploded in the last 10 years. We’re doing so much, we’re literally ahead of ourselves. We don’t have the ability to accurately measure what we are really doing.

Teens especially. Many have access to all of the above news sources, as well as one big news hassle that parents don’t have: teachers who insist they watch the news as homework.

We asked a teenaged boy why adults are so ignorant about what high school students are actually doing. ”You aren’t there,” he smiled, “and we don’t tell you.”

Perhaps we’re just going to have to start asking. We might be surprised by what we learn.