How are young people represented in the print media and what effect does it have on the public and young people themselves.

 Young people are represented many different ways in the print media. Like the TV media some articles present youngsters negatively, as violent and immature whilst others think that young people are growing up too fast and doing things their age group should not be doing. There are some stories of young people being inspirational to others but the negative stories outweigh the positive ones.

An example of how young people are represented is in article 3 ‘Are our kids over sexualised? This article explains how girls are wearing and doing things that girls that young are not supposed to do. An example used in the article is the debate that two twitter users were having as to whether 13 year old girls were allowed to have wax treatments. They go on to explain about sexual clothing that is sold in store in the UK, clothing like padded bras and vulgar tee-shirt slogans. The effect on the public by these kinds of articles is views of disgust. Young people here are viewed as trying to act older than their age but the public seem to blame parents for letting their children wear and act these ways. In the article they describe parents as ‘dumb’ and ‘mindlessly’.

In article two ‘hoodies, louts, scum’: how the media demonises teenagers’ it actually explains how the print media judges teenagers and makes the public fear all teenagers. The article writes about how words like ‘yobs’ ‘thugs’ ‘sick’ etc are used in articles in the past year and how many times they are used. This represents teenagers as violent, dangerous beings who are all the same as each other. There are real life situations where shop owners don’t allow youngsters into their store just because of their age. The article in fact, quotes ‘negative reporting is actually being done to the people we most need to protect’. The article is saying how the public needs to protect the youngsters instead of fearing and demonising them.

The last article ‘drinking neat vodka through your eye for a quick buzz?’ tells a story of a girl who has been made a victim for doing this at university. She now has serious problems with her eye that she has to live with for the rest of her life. This article is aimed at older people who are in university. The article explains how the girl ‘Melissa’ felt pressurised and just did the ‘eyeballing’ to fit in with the crowd. This print media does not just slam young people for doing this insane drinking game but also talks about respected adults doing it at office parties and also filming it to go on YouTube. Young people would be seen as reckless and dangerous by doing this.

In conclusion the print media represents young people as acting older than their age, acting irresponsible but they also realise that the media prints negative things about teenagers that makes the public act discriminative towards them and think all teenagers are the same.