MY FIRST VLOG ABOUT MY 4 TALENT DAY WITH CHANNEL 4

Thought I would give a quick rundown on what it’s like on a Talent Day 🙂

My rant on the representation of young people in the Media!

   Today, your age classifies you into a certain stereotype that not everyone falls into. It’s the generation of hoodies, thugs and drugs. Quite often too, there are knives, pregnancies and falling school results. But who has actually done all this research and concluded that everyone between the ages of 14-19 are vandals? Have they actually spoken to every one of them or just picked a select bunch from the roughest area in London? I’m guessing the second one. These problems that, yes, I’m not saying do not happen, are assigned to our generation, are the problems that tend to make the news headlines; and they linger around for weeks until the media have something better and more juicy to top it. Little wonder that the public are fearful of young people or that young people are scared of their peers. You never hear of a teenager hitting the top stories for doing something to help or make a difference to the community, so has all this publicity about teens been going on for so long that it has now become norm and nobody feels a ‘warm-hearted’ story will sell? Survey, commissioned by Young People Now magazine, suggests third of press articles about young people were about crime and 71% saw young people negatively. What does this say about our elders and sometimes peers?

Maybe the nation just does not believe the good things we have to say anymore. Even when they do produce a positive story regarding a young person, they always have to mention something to balance out. For example, the other day I was watching a segment on the news about 3 boys that has set up their own gardening business. Now this is a good thing, but the media had to add a snippet of information about how they all left school at 15 with no qualifications to their names. Why did that need to be said? Why did the media yet again, portray our generation to be careless and not take our lives seriously? The media did to a point try to focus on the actual idea of the story- the fact they had set up their own business at 17, which is remarkable in these times- but they failed miserably to aim solely at that. People need to stop naively believing everything they see or read and make their judgments’ based on personal experiences. It’s time for adults to do some growing up.

            To top it all off, news reports completely contradict each other. According to some papers, all 16-year-old girls are flouncing around getting pregnant, but the average age of a first time mother is now above 30. What about our academic successes? They can be explained away by easier exams. In a few short words, the status and value of school exams, not to mention the effort put in by young people across the UK, had been totally undermined.  If GCSE students have been reading the “dumbing down” comments, who knows how many may have changed their mind and abandoned their education. Let’s face it, who wants to take on two years’ worth of work to have their efforts so easily dismissed by statistics? The negative way in which the press reports on exams is sadly something we’ve just come to expect. But what a lot of young people don’t realise is that it’s not just education where our achievements are diminished by the media.

 No good story can honestly be true. I know many teenagers who are amazingly positive people and do amazingly positive things. A whole generation can’t be inherently bad. But when we’re expected to be, when we’re portrayed as brats, it gets harder for us not to be. We start to feel that we can miss-behave as it’s already expected of us and we are bound to get away with it as it’s so common now. Not saying that this is a general rule but…

            The media has influenced everybody, even if you fail yourself to admit it. Elderly people, teachers, parents and even shop owners have now had to address youths in a stricter fashion. Why? We are no different to the teens that lived 50 years ago. The only thing that has changed has been the society. We haven’t changed that, we have changed with it. The government is to blame for the change there. If we are not to adapt with it, we wouldn’t survive, get a job, car and a mortgage. A prime example of this is University places. The amount of pressure that goes into University applications is unreal. Some universities have as many as 15 applicants to 1 place. Now what’s that teaching us? Competition, we learn that we have got to be better than anyone else, at any cost. Now normal, level headed youths would think ‘yes I must study harder to get higher grades’. The minority might take that the wrong way, become stressed and turn to drugs to relive that stress and forget about higher education completely. It happens. The need for money is also tremendous. The pressure to make sure we get our loans and accommodation is so burdening. The government is saying we need to go into further education to get better jobs, then they put us through all that when applying, we work hard (mostly) whilst we are doing our degree then what after?  ‘Oh sorry, I don’t care if you have got a degree, you have no experience in this field of work’. This is a tricky one. What follows heaps of hard work, then a ‘no’ in spite of it all? Aggression and quite probably, in some cases, depression. So we end up getting a job in Tesco’s, spend it all on drink, and sit there with your slightly deranged friend with your degree certificate in your lap. That is a rather drastic outcome, I know but cases like this are common.

Another thing that students have been degraded to in these times is that we are only allowed in that little corner shop one at a time. How pathetic. Or only allowed entrance between certain hours! (Ok this doesn’t really apply to Uni students but still, it’s worth mentioning…) It doesn’t matter how you look, speak or dress, the only criterion required is whether you’re a young person. Is that fair? We wouldn’t treat adults in this way, so why treat adolescents like this? To say that young people are saints is wrong, because we’re not, no one is, but this misrepresentation and stereotyping is not doing us any favours. How are we meant to feel towards the government after all of that? No wonder there was riots over University prices.

            However I do not feel that this generation can blame the government for everything. Young people have been slapped with the label of being a danger to society, and are treated accordingly. The small minority who behave antisocially shouldn’t influence the way young people are viewed. I believe that if a child feels cared for he will care for others, show respect and behave in a decent manner. Parents who don’t take good care of their children are raising children who don’t care. Parents should devote time to their kids helping them to cope with the different phases of growing up. The root of antisocial behaviour is with parents who fail in their duties, and I hope the government will do all it can to improve the quality of parenting.

            One thing that I would say has really shown up in the media is the portrayal of teenage boys. Boys are now wearier of others now after the media addressed them as ‘yobs’. Figures show more than half of the stories about teenage boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year (4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most commonly used to describe them was “yobs” (591 times), followed by “thugs” (254 times), “sick” (119 times) and “feral” (96 times). Other terms often used included “hoodie”, “louts”, “heartless”, “evil” “frightening”, “scum”, “monsters”, “inhuman” and “threatening”. The research – commissioned by Women in Journalism – showed the best chance a teenager had of receiving sympathetic coverage was if they died. Now what sort of impression does that give us as the victims? No matter what we do or who with it will always be the same. They felt reality TV – with shows like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent – portrayed them in a better light – with fewer than 20 per cent believing they were being portrayed negatively. The teen boys’ ‘brand’ has become toxic. Media coverage of boys is unrelentingly negative, focusing almost entirely on them as victims or perpetrators of crime – and our research shows that the media is helping make teenage boys fearful of each other. How can they expect boys to no rebel after that?

            We are as a generation portrayed slightly differently on all of the media platforms. In newspaper, it’s generally bad press unless someone dies. We might get occasional recognition regarding statistics (Uni etc.), but they will mostly be negative. On the radio, we are portrayed as modern, careless people who drive our cars dangerously, listening to exceptionally loud rave music, trying to win tickets to an actual rave. With the exception of stations like Radio 2, which we can’t bare to listen to as it might be slightly educational. Also, because it is mainly talking, there will be more news headlines. Then, of course, more stories about us. On the television, it is pretty much a replica of the newspaper, but a bit snazzier. Just adds to the story in the paper- with all the music channels and programs like ‘Skins’ or ‘Waterloo Road’.  Again not the best show if you want to look respectable to your elders. Finally- the internet. Oh that great big world that the older generation refuse to except. The only reason we are associated with it is only because we bother to understand it. Yes, things do go viral now; obviously they couldn’t 50 years ago. But that doesn’t mean to say something incriminating wouldn’t go viral if there was the internet then. But as we will never know and nobody would accept it, we have to accept it. The adult media in this country has spent far too long convincing people that we’re useless, good for nothing yobs. It’s about time they woke up and realised that young people do buy their papers, we do take offence to the way they write about us and we do care what the rest of the population thinks of us.

As a young person you can’t help but question the attitude of large media organisations when you consider that we are tomorrow’s newspaper readers. With print media losing consumers rapidly, a negative attitude is simply not good business sense. I hope one day I can sit next to an elderly person on the bus and they do not cower away.