Notes and quotes

Media Texts

Articles about youth representations in the media.

http://www.ukyouth.org/resources/youth-statistics/item/379-young_people_in_the_media#.Vh5eHvlViko

• 76% of reporting of young people is negative.
• Only 12% of crime is committed by young people.
• 39% of adults are unaware of the positive things young people do.
• Nearly 750 young people completed an online poll for the British Youth Council (BYC) and YouthNet - 80% believed unfair portrayal in the media led to strained relations with older generations.

http://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/65884_Youth_Crime__Representations,_Discourses_and_Data.pdf

• This introductory chapter is designed to promote a critical understanding of the relationship between youth and crime. The equation of these two terms is widely employed and for many is accepted as common sense.

• ‘BRITISH YOUTHS ARE “THE MOST UNPLEASANT AND VIOLENT IN THE WORLD”’ (Daily Mail, 10 August 2011) and ‘LORD OF THE FLIES GANGS RULE ESTATES’ (Sunday Times, 17 August 2003). The first was inspired by the riots in London and elsewhere in the summer of 2011;

•  ‘when the words “children” and “media” occur together it is nearly always in the context of public anxiety about harmful effects, bad examples, corruption of innocence and cultural decline’

• A retired prison doctor and psychiatrist was quoted by the Daily Mail (10 August 2011) as believing British youth were ‘the most unpleasant and potentially most violent young people in the world’ and that the British were now in ‘great fear of their own arrogant, knife-wielding children'

• Daily Mirror (13 August 2011) talked of ‘Anarchy in the UK – teenage wasteland’: ‘With their hoodies and bandannas no longer hiding their faces, the thugs who left us in the grip of anarchy for four days were finally exposed

• An estimated 15,000 people were involved in the riots; about one-quarter were aged under 18

• Yob is a species of young white working class male which if the British media is to be believed, is more common than ever before. The yob is foul mouthed, irresponsible, probably unemployed and violent. The yob hangs around council estates where he terrorises the local inhabitants

• The Daily Mirror (9 August 2011) spoke of ‘Yob Rule’; the Daily Express (15 August 2011) talked of ‘hooded youths in pitched battles with police, all reason gone and high on destruction’; the Daily Mail (11 August 2011) maintained that ‘“feral” children run wild in the streets of UK cities’. A retired prison doctor and psychiatrist was quoted by the Daily Mail (10 August 2011) 

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• The Daily Mirror (9 August 2011) spoke of ‘Yob Rule’; the Daily Express (15 August 2011) talked of ‘hooded youths in pitched battles with police, all reason gone and high on destruction’; the Daily Mail (11 August 2011)

• The ‘positive’ aspects of ‘youthfulness’ that were given coverage were largely accounted for by the atypical careers of a small number of media celebrities and sporting personalities. A tripartite image of youth emerged: as either gifted, dangerous or innocent
• The Riots: In Their Own Words
• London Riots 2011 [ Our Crime ]
• Riot Night - England Riots 2011 Documentary
• London's Burning (2011)
• Is Britain Racist?

7/10 stories reported in the news about young black men are linked to crime

Language in the News

written by: Martin Conboy

News articles by the gaurdian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/11/riots-social-media-gang-culture

• In a parliamentary question in July, she asked the Home Office what assessment they had made "of the contribution of social media to gang culture and related youth violence"; the reply was: "There has been no formal assessment of the contribution of social media to serious youth violence."
• "In the last few years, there has been a real escalation of youth violence, mostly youth on youth, which is why adults have largely been unaware of it."

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/aug/05/chalk-farm-edinburgh-london-riots

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/05/riots-revenge-against-police

• Responding to the findings, the Association of Chief Police Officers said: "The disorder seen in August was unprecedented in its scale of violence and the way in which events escalated rapidly. It took people by surprise, not enough police officers were available initially and it eventually required 16,000 of them to restore order. Of course the way in which those events took place and were seen by others through the media had an impact on confidence in the police, and it is important that lessons are learned from all the different processes and reports investigating what happened. In a survey of 270 rioters, it would be quite odd if a high proportion did not cite the police as a factor in their behaviour. But August also showed the ability of our police to restore order using robust, common sense policing in the British way."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-psychology-of-looting

• It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped."

https://www.teachit.co.uk/attachments/20516_1.pdf

• The events were labelled the ‘London riots’. What are the connotations of the word ‘riot’? Why not ‘civil unrest’, ‘dispute’ or ‘protest’? 

• The Daily Mirror reported of “Young thugs with fire in their eyes and nothing but destruction on their minds.” This comment accompanied a front page with the headline “Yob rule” found here, and the first image is shown on the accompanying resource:
  http://www.politicshome.com/images/1.1.Front_Pages/Mirror_090811.png

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2024284/UK-riots-2011-Liberal-dogma-spawned-generation-brutalised-youths.html

• Rampage: We are told that youths roaming the streets are doing so because they are angry at unemployment, but a quick look at an apprenticeship website yields 2,228 vacancies in London

• If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

• They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

• They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

• The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

• They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

• They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

• They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

 (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/09/london-riots-kidsparents-police) 

• “Residents paint a depressing picture of alienation, anger, boredom and mischief”- This signifies that the writer is bias stating that the people who live in Hackney are making the place worse and saying they are up to mischief. This creates the idea to the reader that all people in hackney are bad even when its possible that people who rioted may have come from outside of Hackney. Title: “A generation”- This signifies that the writer of the article is making an accusation of all teenagers and young people, generalising that they are all the same instead of individuals. This connotes that the writer is likely exaggerating the article and making the participants in the riots a lot larger than what they seem. “Don't respect their parents or police”- This connotes that the younger people are the ones to blame, cutting the law and parents out on who's to blame. This is questionable since some sources claim that it was the police/law that killed an innocent man (Mark Duggan) which sparked off the riots with them to blame. This all equates to connotations of bias on the writers part due to them shifting the blame.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8630533/Riots-the-underclass-lashes-out.html

• No one seemed surprised. Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn. Not Ken and Tony, who used to live in Tottenham and had returned to stand vigil over the missiles and torched cars littering an urban war zone. 

https://www.hertsmere.gov.uk/Documents/08-Parks--Leisure/Children--Young-People/Final-Report---Unbalanced-negative-media-portrayal-of-youth.pdf

• As our research shows, the younger generation have been ignored when they have tried to make a stand and instead are being put down by the media. A current example of this is how the recent student fees protests were sensationalised by the media as ‘riots’ ‐ which deflected away from the real issue and made them look irresponsible. 

• A good recent example of this negative portrayal in the media towards the younger generation is when the student fees protests were held in London. These groups of young people joined together in a peaceful protest to stand up for their beliefs and for something that was going to, or was, affecting their lives in a major way. These peaceful protests were soon turned into riots when some disrespectful youths joined and decided to take violent action. Most of these violent rioters weren't even of the age group that would be affected by the rise of the university fees, however, the media took advantage of this news opportunity and only focused on the stories that the reporters thought would sell newspapers. This news was extremely unbalanced, didn't give all of the facts, and the peaceful protests were not mentioned in most cases, neither were the reasons behind why these protests/riots took place.

• The media portrayal of teenagers plays a big role in that teenagers are stereotyped wherever they go and whatever they do. When people see teenagers they are suspicious of them and suspect that they are up to no good. This has a very bad effect on teenagers as they always feel that people are watching them and suspicious of what they are up to.

• This affects youth and the communities they live in in major way, as the younger generation are forced away from mainstream society because others have heard and read negative portrayals of youth. 

• An implication is the public perceptions of young people is determined by the media portrayal of young people as yobs, hoodies or gang members. They are led to believe that young people are violent, dangerous, disrespectful, bad mannered and overall lazy members of society. This pushes away youth people and could, in some scenarios, begin to transform ambition into abusive behaviour. 

University websites/academic papers online.
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep01303?WT.ec_id=SREP-20130226

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2000.tb01168.x/abstract


http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12004/pdf


http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_34#page-1


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275112000315

Any other relevant sites/articles - the more the better.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/05/who-were-the-rioters

• The debate in the aftermath of the August riots could easily have left the impression that those involved were exclusively young, black gang members with long criminal histories.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/aug/16/london-riots-young-people-voice-anger

• There are different reasons [why people rioted], some are doing it for the right reasons, some just for the sake of doing crime, people have had enough. But even the people taking advantage have a reason. It's very hard to get jobs, these people are from poor areas, have nothing, they want stuff for free. Other people, like myself, have had enough of the government. It's self-explanatory – the government doesn't care about us, there are no jobs.

• I don't think people are protesting in the right way. I saw people from 13 to 30 there. I saw everyday, normal people in the shops, helping themselves. Everyone has had enough of paying taxes so the rich get richer.

• A lot of trials and tribulations led to this, people think everyone has no reason. It can't get worse for us, people in the ghetto. No one cares about us so what are we supposed to do? There has always been a big gap between youth and the police. We're trying to get their attention. People are crying out for help.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15426720

• England rioters 'poorer, younger, less educated

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14462688

• "Young people are bored and feel they have nothing to lose," said former gang member Kim Gardner, who now mentors young people in gangs to try to help them turn their lives around.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14467988

• Many of the 600 people arrested after Monday's rioting are young men in their 20s who have never had a previous skirmish with the law.

http://media.edusites.co.uk/article/ocr-a2-media-studies-g325-section-b-collective-identity-youth/

• “Youth are still subject to a constructed, stereotypical identity in many ways but within a rapidly changing digital landscape”.

There’s a riot going on

• "In particular, it's interesting to look at how the participants were described. In most of the tabloid media coverage, the rioters were consistently and repeatedly identified as young people. These were the 'feral youth', the 'hoodies' and 'yobs' who apparently rampage uncontrolled in our cities, bent simply on destruction for its own sake."

• A good starting point is to look at the language that was used to describe what took place. To talk about 'riots' rather than, for example, 'civil disturbances' or 'unrest' - or even 'uprisings' or 'protests' - immediately defines the meaning of the events in particular ways. The word riot suggests something wild and unrestrained, something fundamentally irrational that cannot be explained. The riots, we were told, were simply an 'orgy of brutality', in which people appeared to lose all rational control.

• The newspapers consistently featured large, dramatic images of what the Daily Mirror called 'young thugs with fire in their eyes and nothing but destruction on their mind', or the Daily Express called simply 'flaming morons'.

• The spectre of the mob, of marauding gangs, of the violent underclass, has a long history; although in the Conservatives' account of the social collapse of 'Broken Britain', these fears have taken on a new urgency. These young people, we were told, had not been sufficiently socialised: they were led simply by a kind of 'childish destructiveness'.

• In fact, many of the people ultimately convicted for crimes during the rioting were by no means young. Youth offending, youth detention and reoffending have declined in recent years. Meanwhile, just a few weeks later, young people achieved record passes in their GCSE and A Level exams. Those involved in the disturbances were obviously a small minority. Yet in much of the media coverage, they came to stand for Young People - or particular categories of young people - in general.

• There is obviously a class dimension to these representations. The 'feral youth' imagined by the politicians and the tabloid headline writers are implicitly working-class. In his recent book Chavs, Owen Jones points to the emergence of a new form of class contempt in modern Britain. The working class, he argues, has become an object of fear and ridicule, not just in this kind of media coverage but also in popular figures such as Little Britain's Vicky Pollard and Catherine Tate's 'Am I bovvered?' character.

• Again, this is despite the fact that many of those ultimately convicted after the rioting were in respectable middle-class jobs, or from wealthy backgrounds.

• These kinds of images of young people are unfortunately typical of much news media coverage. A 2005 IPSOS/MORI survey found that 40% of newspaper articles featuring young people focused on violence, crime or anti-social behaviour; and that 71% could be described as having a negative tone. Research from Brunel University during 2006 found that television news reports of young people focused overwhelmingly either on celebrities such as footballers or (most frequently) on violent crime; while young people accounted for only 1% of the sources for interviews and opinions across the whole sample.

• a study by the organisation Women in Journalism analysed 7,000+ stories involving teenage boys, published in online, national and regional newspapers during 2008. 72% were negative - more than twenty times the number of positive stories (3.4%). Over 75% were about crime, drugs, or police: the great majority of these were negative (81.5%) while only a handful were positive (0.3%). 

• Many of the stories about teenage boys described them using disparaging words such as yobs, thugs, sick, feral, hoodies, louts, heartless, evil, frightening and scum.

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