For as long as anyone can remember the battle between youths and older generations has been fuelled by the media…“playgrounds have been turned into battlegrounds” and words are now a lethal weapon. It is a binary opposition which has been taken to extraordinary levels and waged a war between adolescents and adults.
The media has taken the stereotype of youths, the way the public view youths and the way in which youths view themselves, and exploited the idea, turning it into nothing, but a delusional monster. The youths of society are tomorrow’s future leaders, inventors and scientists, eager to learn and offering new perspectives. The media however, has hijacked the appearance of teenagers, constructing a distorted idea, and warping their reputation into a fictitious lie based on “half-truths”, appearance and generalisation. The Sunday Herald Sun and Courier-Mail newspaper articles have fabricated the stereotypes of youths as violent “animals” and “thugs”, therefore manipulating their audiences to adopt the invited readings through means of silencing, marginalising, generalising and use of connotative language.
The Sunday Herald Sun newspaper article ‘Sad Increase of Youth Violence’ is an example of the gross injustice and distortion of the stereotype of youths; an article which extends beyond so far as to generalise all teens as “bloody-thirsty, animal-like” thugs. The article misrepresents a majority, if not all teenagers as dangerous delinquents and untrusting monsters who are a dysfunctional sector of society. The newspaper article constructs a deceptive and incorrect generalisation of youths; repeatedly associating teens with animal-like terminology and connotative meanings, where youths are painted as not only the e...
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...raying teens as “young trouble makers…like a pack of animals” with uncontrollable urges to destruct everything in their path. The world’s media has sunken to a new low, to a point where the enticement of money is now more important than the conscience of the honest truth. The media must undoubtedly improve their behaviour and representations of youth culture, or risks seeing an even greater division between youths and society.
Works Cited
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/sad-increase-of-youth-violence/story-e6frf7kx-1111114373899
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/youth-gangs-rule-streets/story-e6freoof-1111117083344
http://members.fortunecity.com/smashx14/portrayal.html
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/look-beyond-the-scare-stories-the-kids-are-all-right-20111024-1mfq6.html
http://www.npsp.sa.gov.au/page.aspx?u=1010
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