What Americans see and hear about youth in the news bears little resemblance to young people's real lives. Repeated images of students as schoolhouse killers, coupled with the absence of more balanced depictions of youth in general, have stereotyped youth as violent and depraved. BMSG director Lori Dorfman and Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute explain why this is damaging to the public and how the news media can improve its coverage of youth.
Do we get enough information from the news to understand violence among youth? To answer that question, BMSG director Lori Dorfman and Justice Policy Institute president Vincent Schiraldi analyzed more than 100 scientific studies of news content of youth and crime. Their findings, explained in this article, are disturbing.
If you get your information on youth from the media, you likely think young people are much more violent than they really are. That's the conclusion of Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News, a report from Berkeley Media Studies Group. The report found that throughout the 1990s, as juvenile crime went down, stories on juvenile crime went up.
A report from Berkeley Media Studies Group shows that the media's focus on youth violence, especially among youth of color, is out of proportion to the problem. Media tend to overreport stories with youth and ethnic minorities as criminals and underreport instances in which they are victims.
The media are providing a distorted view of adolescents and crime, leaving the impression that violence runs amok, youths are doomed and that black kids deserve much of the blame, says a report from Berkeley Media Studies Group.