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Youth in the Media: Resource Framing the Issue
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Nearly five years after two young men unleashed gunfire on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the images still resonate: angry, gun-slinging teenagers; yellow police tape; bodies and blood everywhere. The headlines resonate too: "School War Zone" (Rocky Mountain News); "Are Schools Safe?" (CNN); "Violence in Schools Is Defying Prevention: Vigilance Grows, but Stopping It Seems Impossible" (St. Paul Pioneer Press).
But it doesn't take a horrific event to scare up images of young people gone bad. Consider several articles in late 1995 and early 1996 that warned the public to beware of a phenomenon that hadn't yet come to pass and, as it turned out, never would: the rise of "superpredator" youth—a generation of disenfranchised, angry teens raised on welfare who were threatening to embark upon an unprecedented crime wave.
The term was coined in The Weekly Standard in November 1995, in an article titled "The Coming of the Super-Predators." The idea was picked up in one form or another by, among others, U.S. News & World Report ("Taming Teenage Wolf Packs") and Time ("Now for the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb"). Many of these were, of course, written to capture readers' attention, but the facts did not bear out the headlines.
When it's reported at all, good news tends to get lost. The Benton Foundation, in its 1999 publication "Effective Language for Communicating Children's Issues," observes that youth success stories—such as the Head Start program—have little impact in the face of relentless crime stories night after night that "demonize" teenagers. "The consequence of this type of coverage, according to media effects research, is that exposure to teen crime (particularly minority crime) increases public support for the most punitive public policies," Benton says.
For a 2002 report, "Coverage in Context," the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families examined 1,065 editions of newspapers and 354 television newscasts in terms of five topics of importance to the well-being of children: child abuse and neglect; childcare; child health insurance; teen childbearing; and youth crime and violence. Results showed that crime and violence accounted for about half of the news coverage, and that less than a quarter of those stories included any trend or background information.
Such publicity, particularly when a crime happens in schools or is drug- or gang-related, sways public perceptions. "Among those who perceive a crime problem nationally, 82% say their assessment is based on crime reports they've seen in the news," according to the New York City Youth Media Study, in which a group of South Bronx teens analyzed reporting on youth issues in The New York Times over a year. "Only 17% say it's based on their personal experience."
Youth advocates lament the bleak and unrealistic picture of youth often portrayed in the media today. "By rarely covering children and, when they do, reporting primarily negative stories, local television news marginalizes many issues that directly impact children's lives," said Patti Miller, director of the Children & the Media program at Children Now, an organization focusing on children's issues. "This sends the wrong message to children, parents, voters, and policymakers."
Miller made those remarks in announcing the results of a national study in 2001, "The Local Television News Media's Picture of Children." The study reported that local news broadcasts underrepresent the presence of children in society, distort the level of crime committed by and against children, and seldom focus on public policy issues that affect American families.
A Misinformed Public The "superpredator" crime wave predicted in the mid-1990s never arrived, but public opinion thought it did. Sixty percent of Californians polled in 1996 said they believed juveniles were responsible for most violent crime. In fact, youth were responsible only for about 13% of violent crime that year. The trend since then has been downward. In 2001, according to the FBI, youths committed 5% of the nation's homicides and 12% of violent crimes, both historic lows.
A related misperception is what the New York City Youth Media Study called "the myth of rising school violence." According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, despite the Columbine shooting of April 1999, the number of school-associated violent deaths during that school year was down 40% from the previous year. "The odds of dying a violent death in a school in America [in 1999] was one in two million," the center reported. Fewer fights were reported among students that year as well. In fact, youth are far more likely to be victimized at home than at school.
The distorted picture of crime and the erroneous perception that school violence is increasing were the top two findings in the 2000 New York City Youth Media Study. But the study also points out that media coverage rarely discusses alternatives to jail or prison to rehabilitate offenders. Moreover, in most cases, the stories come from the police and prosecutors and are thus one-sided. Crime coverage also tends to be racialized. Youth of color are more likely to be pictured and less likely to have humanizing biographical details printed.
Another familiar subject in the media is the failure of public schools and students' poor performance on standardized tests. Such stories are often simplistically presented as "winners and losers." "Only two topics dominate routine youth coverage: education and violence. No other topic receives even a third as much attention," says a report titled "Youth and Violence in California Newspapers" by the Berkeley Media Studies Group (2000). In a routine sample of media coverage during 1999, the Berkeley group found that 26% of youth-related stories were devoted to K-12 education, 25% to violence, and only 1% to "good deeds." Stories about problems outnumbered those about solutions.
Educators by and large perceive the media as biased. In a 1997 survey, educators overwhelmingly agreed that reporters "report low achievement without contexts for evaluating those findings; unfairly dwell on conflict and failure; use quotes or statistics out of context; and have caused much of the decline in public confidence in schools." The results were published in "The Lamentable Alliance between the Media and School Critics," a chapter in the book Imaging Education: The Media and Schools in America (1998). Authors David C. Berliner and Bruce I. Biddle say that "newspapers have become a natural ally of those that believe that public education has failed." They point out that inadequate school budgets and poverty among families and neighborhoods are strongly related to test performance, but that such statistics are seldom included.
Seen often enough, and without other types of stories as balance, media messages invite the conclusion that teenagers are lazy, dangerous, and self-absorbed. "The fear and concern adults have regarding the youngest generation of Americans stands out" in study after study, Children's Defense Fund-Minnesota reports.
Effects on Public PolicyFor sound, effective public policy, democracy relies on an informed public. When the information on which policies are based is distorted, the result is usually bad policy. And public policy has become youth averse.
"What harm is there in demonizing youth?" ask Berliner and Biddle. "Either by implication, or sometimes quite directly, the schools are held to blame for our youths' alleged licentiousness, violence, and drug use. Therefore, those schools are deemed unworthy of support."
In the wake of the Columbine shootings, the online journal Salon reported about legislation that would hold children as young as 10 responsible for violent crimes and allow them to receive the death penalty. "Since 1970 we have cut back spending on education by at least 25% and upped funding for incarceration by $3.2 billion," Salon said.
 Meanwhile, schools themselves are becoming more prison-like, adopting zero-tolerance policies that leave little room for normal adolescent missteps. "The zero-tolerance policy of the post-Columbine high school (adopted by 90% of the nation's school systems) did nothing to prevent the more recent shootings in Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota in October 2003 and Santana High School in Santee, California, in March 2001. But it did succeed in having 514 children arrested over the last year in Pima County, Arizona, for making comments perceived as threats; in having an 8-year-old in Arkansas suspended for pointing a chicken finger at a teacher and saying 'pow;' and a New Jersey 9-year-old suspended for threatening to shoot a wad of paper with a rubber band," education expert Patricia Molloy writes in "Moral Spaces and Moral Panics: High Schools, War Zones and Other Dangerous Places," which appeared in the British journal Culture Machine.
Police now have a presence in schools around the country, the magazine ColorLines reported in its winter 1999-2000 issue. Although police do provide security, they sometimes go to extremes, as the magazine notes: "In Drew, Mississippi, a rural town of 8,000 people, of whom 80% are black, there are reports of 10-year-old children being taken from school to the State Department of Corrections for such 'crimes' as talking back to teachers. 'Children are not allowed to make mistakes as they grow up,' says Johnnie Johnson, a staff person with the Drew Community Voters League."
Society's LossDemonization of young people can reinforce racial discrimination and prevent the public from focusing on the reality of the lives of youth in America today. Moreover, it can create the very alienation and hopelessness that can produce criminal behavior. A longer-term, broader danger also lurks in the punitive policies adopted to protect the public from youth. That is, people fail to see youth as a society's primary asset.
A headline in The New York Times on August 13, 2003, read: "Great Haven for Families but Don't Bring Children." The story reported that many suburbs are trying to keep families out via zoning and building codes that favor small apartments and condos or encourage commercial development instead of multifamily residential. The reason? Young people are troublesome and expensive. Places with young people require schools, and taxpayers don't want to pay for them.
The story was one more grain of evidence that our society, at some level, sees young people as a liability instead of an asset. Ironically, the aging population most critical of youth needs future generations to pay for its retirement and has a huge vested interest in ensuring—through good schools and enlightened public policy—that young people grow up healthy, happy, and productive. Articles that remind people of this and focus on the potential of youth could counterbalance the barrage of crime stories.
 What's the Solution?The media, too, have a vested interest in more balanced coverage of youth. There is some evidence that youth are becoming "media-resistant," tuning the news out as no longer relevant to their lives. If that happens, where will they get their information?
The Casey study of "Children and Family Journalism" reports that although "too much of the reporting about children is still shallow and sensational," there is increasing interest in the media on seeking solutions and telling fuller stories about children and family issues.
Agencies, advocates, and educational organizations that focus on children's issues offer several recommendations for improving the portrayal of youth in the media. Among them are the following:
- Encourage young people to speak for themselves, promoting youth-created media to give them the opportunity to do so. Agencies that provide media training for their leaders, for example, can include young people served by the agency as spokespersons.
- Demand more context in reporting about crime. Ask newspapers and broadcast outlets to devote more resources to covering crime, drawing on sources other than police and prosecutors to look for root causes and to connect individual events to larger public policies. For example, public health sources can help interpret data and speak about prevention efforts. When reporters and editors do a good job, tell them.
- Encourage communities to ask the deeper questions: who benefits when young people are portrayed as selfish, irresponsible, and violent?
- Demand that other youth issues—health care, education, employment, leadership, youth organizing, child abuse—receive as much coverage as crime.
- Be a critical consumer of news coverage. Don't be swayed by sensationalistic reporting. Challenge the myths of rising youth crime and school violence. Examine statistics and determine the facts. If you see crime coverage that draws erroneous conclusions, speak out.
- Tap into the potential of youth as a political force. Youth organizing can help youth create a critical mass to challenge media stereotypes.
- Look for solutions other than incarceration for youth crime. Journalists covering youth crime have an opportunity to publicize such solutions by interviewing youth advocates and even youth themselves.
- Join advocacy organizations such as Children Now that work to improve news coverage of children's issues.
Finally, many youth advocates are encouraging youth to become media savvy. The growth of young people in media-making is growing astronomically, according to Listen Up!, a nonprofit organization that encourages a youth voice in the mass media. The Internet has made it inexpensive to disseminate ideas around the world.
If the negative portrayal of youth in mainstream media has had any positive outcome, it is in prompting organizations and individuals to encourage and promote youth media literacy and youth-created media. Says Listen Up!: "We are constantly searching for the mythical silver bullet that will wipe away our problems in one clean sweep. However, despite America's love for instant solutions, we will not find them by silencing and locking away our young people."
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