Commercializing Distrust: Framing Juveniles in the News

Abstract

As the previous chapter demonstrates, popular perceptions of (and attitudes towards) children are intrinsically related to their portrayals in the news. Time and again, baleful media stories about abuse, abduction, youth antisocial behaviour, fatal road crashes and even accidents in domestic settings were raised by focus group participants as reference-points for their decisions about how to safeguard their children — including from other people’s. Meanwhile, the minority of audience members who took time to post direct responses to online newspaper articles projecting these twin frames of juvenile ‘victim’ and ‘threat’ overwhelmingly echoed this simmering sense of parental panic. Like focus group parents writing their captions, they often directly aped tropes and phraseology routinely reproduced in the press. But identifying an apparent correlation — if not quite a causal connection — between how juveniles are conceived by the public on the one hand and newspapers on the other only gets us so far in our mission to explain how contemporary childhood has come to be constructed as a social problem. Just how ‘dominant’ (Hall, 1980) is the media’s day-to-day problematization of juveniles as objects (and, occasionally, agents) of peril, when measured against the many and varied other ways in which they are represented on the page?