In Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation Mike Males
describes and analyses various representations of youth in the media and
reveals the logical fallacies in the reasoning that justifies these
representations and the outright falsities asserted in them. Youth are portrayed
in media as a direly perplexed group that culminate the issues of drugs,
violence, deviance, manipulation (being the subjects of), and mindlessness. The
way anything is portrayed in media has a significant effect on how the public
views the given issue, thus making the issue of youth portrayal in media a
serious one.
Males examines various myths about
youth and shows how statistics completely disagree with such myths. One example is the concern about youth and
the danger the Internet poses to them. He notes the preoccupation with children
becoming victims of pedophiles through communication on the internet, and how
in reality there are very few cases per year. Cases of teenage driving and
teenage violence are also used as examples of statistical disagreements with
the media’s representation of youth. Although statistics don’t provide
indisputable evidence in many cases due to various variables, small sample
sizes as compared to the whole (potential anomalies and variations may skew the
statistics), they appear to work in the cases in which Males uses them. And
after all, they are meant to provide support for his overall argument, not
meant to be his overall argument.
Males furthermore describes how
many of the media portrayals of youth also blames them for various problems and
how certain flaws in youth, such as gullibility or vulnerability are the routes
of such issues. He gives an example in which Rolling Stone article “Death
in a Schoolyard” asserts youth are obsessed with violent entertainment and
cites that and youth culture as indirect causes of school shootings. The article
uses skewed and careless statistics to argue the point, while failing to be diligent
and properly consider equally pressing problems of adults.
Each example given by Males in
someway represents the view of youth at the time “as not-quite-adults.” In each
example youth are represented as something less than adults, with diminished
capacity but not beyond saving (concerns about vulnerability to media
manipulation, concerns about vulnerability to the internet, concerns about
vulnerability to violent entertainment etc). Other examples also show the
overlap between past and modern views. For example, in the teenage driving example
youth are thought of as dangerous drivers i.e. “youth as a dangerous class.” In
general this shows how each temporal view see youth as something separate from
adults.
The way the media represents youth,
however, in such examples is problematic because of how detrimental they are to
the perception of youth and how misguided they are in general. Youth are
not-so-much in need of fixing as the way the media represents youth is in need
of fixing.
