The Roles of Speakers in Local Television News Stories on Youth and Violence

Similarly, television news has been charged with presenting a distorted picture of youth. Nearly half (48 percent) of television news reports concerning children involve violence, usually news of specific crimes and their subsequent investigation and prosecution.12 Dale Kunkel contends that the emphasis on crime and violence, coupled with a lack of stories on public policy issues pertinent to children, “seems to skew the information the press provides to the public, which may in turn diminish the public's perception of the relative importance of other child-related concerns.”13 Mike Males goes further, charging that by misrepresenting the factors surrounding issues such as teen pregnancy and violence, in particular by not reporting the relationship of poverty to most social ills, the media have encouraged the practice of blaming young people for the problems from which they and society as a whole suffer.14