Young people are often negatively portrayed by the media. The media show a large amount of news stories about of the high threat from hoodies, youth knife crime, binge drinking and ASBOs being 'awarded' to young people. Even some ‘good news’ stories are portrayed negatively such as the rising marks at GCSEs and A levels are taken as ‘are exams getting easier?’. Although, the media are very aware of how the stories affect societies views of youths as recently articles have been highlighting the issue. Yet the negative media coverage of youths continues to stereotype them as troublemakers who don’t get involved in the community and do practically nothing of use.
An example of the media being aware of the effects is an article in the Telegraph where it uses statistics to show how the media have create a moral panic of teenage behaviour. "Figures show more than half of the stories about teenage boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year (4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most commonly used to describe them was "yobs" (591 times), followed by "thugs" (254 times), "sick" (119 times) and "feral" (96 times)." This supports the idea that the media are aware of the effects and impacts of the article on youths. Another example could be the documentary is 'teen troubles' where they focus on a girl who was given multiple ASBOs where the media then referred to her as "asbo queen." The presenter asked the newspaper why they did that they explained that: Most news about anybody or anything is negative. Bad news sells more than good news and so is reported more. Bad news stories such as crises, starvation, youth crime etc are reported more because they are considered more interesting and more newsworthy. People want to know about how much crime their is in their area and who causes it, if crime goes up there is a media frenzy. If on the other hand crime goes down it is just given a much smaller mention, often counterbalanced by a story about people's perception of crime going up rather than down."
Film is another medium that portray youth as being criminals and corrupting society. Attack the block from 2011 by Joe Cornish at the start of the film juxtaposes a group of youths wearing Black clothes and covering their face with a young white women wearing a practical green coat. Their language is also juxtaposes "fuck the feds" and "get mucked" compared "hello mother." This shows a stereotypical view of teenagers although the plot changes the view of teenagers as they save the world from aliens invading where several youths even died to save their block. This exaggeration and unrealistic plot gives the alternative opinion of teenagers by suggesting that they can have a positive impact on society but they aren't appreciated for it. This is best shown when the protagonist Mose's comes up with the theory that the government sent the aliens to attack the block to get rid of them. Yet they are the ones fighting them off and protecting society and others such as when they ask the nurse why her boyfriend isn't protecting her.
A recent Tv programme that is being promoted , "Aliens", comically illustrates the idea that youths should be isolated and separated from the rest of society so that they don't disrupt and corrupt the community by labelling them Aliens. The plot twist shows that the protagonist who detests the youths/ aliens is half alien this connotes that their are two sides of the story that should be considered. If this stereotype is accepted by the youths then they will struggle to act the way that society wishes them too.
There are two modern examples that use the theme of Aliens to demonstrate youths in society. Overall, this shows that Teenagers will struggle as in the media they are shown as being isolated in society which could be due to their behaviour that realistically causes them to be separated. However, they also imply that the media could be the cause of their behaviour as well as the media separating them from society as the media create the moral panics that are acted upon in the community.
A historic example that also supports this theory is how the media reported the Mods and the Rocker. Titles of the newspapers link the coverage to films such as " Wild ones Invade..." and "West Side Story on England Coast." The Daily mirror and Belgian Papers illustrate this as they were
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