Media Portrayal of young people - February 09
With starting off our priority on the media portrayal of young
people it was important to get a good understanding of what the
current situation is. To start things off we needed to ask
ourselves some important questions during our Adivosory Group
meeting in February 2009. Here are the results of our discussions,
as you can see there were some areas we still needed to work on to
help define how we could make progress on this subject:
1) Who do you think has the power to change things? (you can
list as many as you think)
- I think that people such as editors of newspapers have the
power to change the way that young people are portrayed in the
media as they are the ones which are putting stories into the
newspapers and convincing people that all youth are bad
- Directors of new reports
- Magazine directors
- Newspaper directors
2) How do newspapers and TV reports affect people?
- Makes people less respectful towards children
- Newspapers and TV reports affect people’s views on youth as
they are constantly showing stories about teenagers that have done
something wrong whereas instead they should present a mixture of
negative and positive images of young people so that other people
can make up their mind about how they feel.
3) What are the difficulties in tackling this issue?
- I think people are more likely to listen to stories that are
more dramatic and therefore media put in stories with violence to
attract more viewers.
- Once a person has an image in their head that youth are bad
nowadays it is hard to make them change their mind. It will also be
difficult to stop magazine and newspapers and TV shows from feeding
out negative images of young people as in this day and age people
like reading stories and watching programmes which include this
type of content – therefore the companies will make more
money.
4) What could Young NCB/NCB do about this?
5) Do you know of any projects near you or nationally that are
working on this issue?
6) Reducing the negative portrayal/increasing positive portrayal
of young people
7) What impact, if any, does the way young people are shown in
the media have on
- you and your friends,
- your local community,
- the country?
- anything else?
8) What sort of negative stories about young people have you
read or seen recently?
- Travellers, gypsies, refugees, asylum seekers, black and ethnic
minorities, vulnerable groups
9) Is there anyone we could join up with to work on this
issue?
10) Does this priority have an effect on or is it affected by
any of the other three YNCB priorities?
11) Why do you think there is more negative stuff written about
young people than there is positive stuff?