Teenage boys and the media

I read with interest an article in the Guardian this weekend about teenage boys and how misrepresented they are in the media. The figures are pretty striking:

"A survey of 1,000 teenage boys in the UK showed that 88% of them believed their career prospects were good, and 88% regarded themselves as ambitious; 87% were happy in their family lives, 87% were happy in their social lives, and 81% were happy in their school or work lives."

This contrasts with the negative media portrayal of young people - particularly young men:

"An Echo survey earlier this year, commissioned by Women in Journalism, examined the language used to describe teenage boys in the media. The most common word was "yobs" (which appeared 591 times over a year), followed by thugs (254 times), sick (119), feral (96) and hoodie (60). More than 60% of the stories about teenage boys concerned crime, and 90% of these showed them in a bad light."

We all know that media portrayals of young people are negative - but this is outragous. The media are really letting us down as a society when words like "yobs" and "thugs" are considered legitimate media discourse.

All of this is why part of our work at The Youth of Today is to try to seed positive news stories about young people: focusing on the contributions young people are making to society and the good work being done every day. Hopefully we can shine a light on the vast majority of young people to whom current media portrayals don't do justice.