To what extent does news media create moral panic and represent teenagers in a negative way that the public should fear?
In my group was Shivani & Ashwaria, we had a thorough discussion into a number of things including the stereotypical representations of youths today as well as the positive and more latent portrayal of them in the media. A key hypothesis that we came up with was this; Teenagers of today are more than often represented in a negative way within the media because it provides them with something to talk about (which could be due to the high level of controversy surrounding the matter). Everybody in our group agreed with that to a certain degree.
We also agreed that the media at times does present the youth of today in a positive manner at time and went on to give a numerous amount of examples including BBC News's youth clubs where they present children in a positive light. However on the other hand we did discuss Perkins theory which states that stereotypes do contain some element of truth which may apply for this scenario as teenagers are able to be both mischievous and at time dangerous.
Finally we discussed the way that different audiences would interpret and used the example of riots, if an older audience were to see on the news that a riot had occurred in their local area involving teenagers they would automatically assume that all teenagers are hooligans and 'hoodrats' which is a platform for more stereotypes to be built.
