Did someone steal all the old books? This is absurd on its face.
I guess the implication is that without such advertisements, old books are lost media for young kids. Their first brush is with new media that IS advertised to them, and upon finding it not compatible to their tastes (at least acc to the article) young boys tune out of the reading hobby altogether.
Obvious retort is that this where parents should step in... but that's a whole different debate.
“But even if the backlist contains a wealth of fiction starring boys, that’s not always a help to today’s young readers. Laura Gardner, a veteran middle-school librarian in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me that although some of the classics still stand up—kids love Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and its sequels, along with the I Survived series—many students have a hard time getting into literature from past decades. Thanks to the disruptions of the pandemic, middle schoolers are coming into Gardner’s library with lower reading levels than they were when she started her career 17 years ago. But even the high-achieving students, she’s noticed, can’t be coaxed into picking up a book for fun unless it’s action-packed. “If the pacing isn’t pretty quick, then you’re going to lose the kid,” Gardner said. Older titles tend to feature more descriptive language and longer chapters; they start with more exposition, and have plots that unspool more slowly than today’s attention spans are used to.”