43. Using Material from Item C and Elsewhere, Assess the View That the Mass Media Represent Young People as a Problem Group.

523 Words3 Pages
The media is known to represent young people in particular set ways, and it can be argued that the mass media only represents young people as being a problem group. However, this view ignores all of the positive ways in which young people are portrayed, and the ways in which media content is aimed towards young people. According to source C, young people are often represented as being a source of social problems. Activities frequently enjoyed by young people, such as playing video games and drinking with friends, are often totally demonised by the media. This results in extreme and inaccurate views of the activities of young people, that often relies upon scare tactics and the over exaggeration of rare news stories in order to make such activities seem worse than they are. This leads to youth being constructed as folk devils, which occurs after the resulting moral panics. Examples of this include the mods and rockers of the 1960s. Although relatively few youths identified as either of these labels, as the media pushed the story of the 'war between mods and rockers' onto the public, this in turn led to more youths choosing to identify as a mod or rocker. This is known as the deviancy amplification spiral, in which the media makes a relatively small problem much worse, thus presenting young people as a problem group. In Wayne et al.'s (2008) content analysis of 2130 news items across all television channels during 2006, he found that young people were mainly represented s being a violent threat to society. They also found that it was very rare for the media to feature the opinion or perspective of young people. The media often gives a very one dimensional picture of youth that encourages fear and condemnation. He argues that by focusing only on this narrow view of what youth is like, it distracts the rest of the population from the true problems that young

More about 43. Using Material from Item C and Elsewhere, Assess the View That the Mass Media Represent Young People as a Problem Group.

Open Document