age Flashcards
Heintz-Knowles - Childhood (traditional)
Examined child characters in entertainment programmes and found out: children are motivated by peer relationships and romance, most characters are anti-school resulting in positive outcomes, minority ethnic groups are underrepresented, boys and girls are equally represented but girls are twice as likely as boys to show affection and boys are more likely to use physical aggression.
Childhood TV is based on the adult perspective on children. Eg, Horrid Henry (anti-school).
Griffin - Youth (traditional)
Media portrays them in 3 ways: deviant, dysfunctional and suffering a deficit. These are amplified to create a moral panic.
Wayne - Youth (traditional)
82% of the stories focussed on young people as either perpetrators or victims of crime. The media ignores stories about how young people are affected by problems in housing, education, health, unemployment, parental abuse and politics.
Women in Journalism - Youth (traditional)
Hoodies or Altar Boys - How teenage boys were presented in news papers: negative descriptive language (thugs, evil, heartless), teens and crime is the most frequent topic, few stories showed them in a good light - 24% of teens and sports were positive and 16% of teens and entertainment were positive, 85% of boys said reality TV portrayed them the most fairly and teenagers become more weary of other teenagers.
Kelly - Youth (traditional)
3 main types of language used by journalists to describe young people who come into contact with the law: they’re dangerous, they’re in need of protection and they’re immature.
Cohen - Youth (traditional)
Folk devils and moral panics - Clash between mods and rockers in Clacton on Sea, media over dramatises it which lead to bigger clashes in Brighton (but still not as bad as they were reported).
Age Concern - Elderly (traditional)
There are 3 key media stereotypes of the elderly: a burden, mentally challenged and grumpy.
Landis - Elderly (traditional)
Supports the Age Concern study, said they were depicted as one dimensional. Eg, feisty old woman, sickly old person, having wisdom, second childhood.
Cuddly and Fiske - Elderly (traditional)
In the US, only 1.5% of characters are elderly, they usually play minor roles and as a form of comedy. The media depicted their mental, physical and sexual capacities as ineffective.
Milner et al - Elderly (traditional)
The media does not portray a balanced view of ageing, to do this they’d have to present: challenges of getting older, plus the positive opportunities with ageing. Eg, active ageing.
Postman - Childhood (changing)
The idea of childhood has begun to disappear as children interact more with the media. Adults and children share the same music, sports, language, literature and films (and there’s a lack of difference between adult and child clothes), this leads to children and youths being exposed to adult content (eg. sex and violence).
Osgerby - Youth (changing)
The media ‘mirror the spirit of the times’, the changes in media representations of youth reflect wider cultural developments. Eg, fighting for social change could be seen as deviant and norm breaking (Greta Thumberg is positive deviance). Explained that in the 50s and 60s after the war hope and youth were portrayed positively, but in the 70s and 80s they were associated with violence and going against society’s norms and values.
Lee et al - Elderly (changing)
Old people are underrepresented appearing in 15% of ads, however of that 15%, 90% were positive, portrayed as ‘golden agers’.
Older men are more visible in the media and are more likely to be associated with high status and work whereas older women are generally associated with family and poverty.
Biggs - Elderly (changing)
There is evidence of both change and continuity in representation of old age in media. He found there was larger number of elderly in soap operas (eg. Coronation Street), however there was more negative depictions of the elderly in sitcoms (eg. the Catherine Tate show), but they also showed older people as more active (eg. Dirty Grandpa).
Sontag - Elderly (traditional)
Double standard of ageing - Linking to Lee et al’s study, women are pressured into masking the signs of ageing, men are not.
