13E's Class Notes from the double lesson

1. How were teenagers and young
people historically depicted,
portrayed and represented in the
media?

2. How were teenagers and young people historically
depicted, portrayed and represented in the media?
Daily Mirror – 1964
“Wild Ones”
“Rampaging Teenagers”
“Roaring”
“[they] Shattered [the] resort”
“ Fighting”
“Crammed with youngsters”
“Invaded” – Alienation
Emotive / Over the top /

3. • Cohen – 1972
• “Mob was described as “exhilarating, drunk with notoriety” and “hell bent for
destruction”
• Sensational Headlines
– “Orgy of destruction”
– “battle” “attack” “siege”
• Melodramatic vocabulary
• The Media used interviews – at least partially ‘fabricated’ (made up) because too
stereotypical.
• Daily Express “Smeared the traditional postcard scene with blood and violence”
• Cohen is concerned by how the media interpret, and present (represented) the
scene.
• ‘Over reported’
• Exaggeration of:
– The seriousness of the events
– The numbers taking part
– The amount of damage and violence
– The effects of the damage and violence.
How were teenagers and young people historically
depicted, portrayed and represented in the media?

4. Youth Culture and crime, what can we learn from History? –
http://www.historyextra.com/feature/youth-culture-and-crime-what-can-we-
learn-history
• The historian Geoffrey Pearson quotes a 60-year-old named Charlotte
Kirkman, who lamented that, “I think morals are getting much worse...
There were no such girls in my time as there are now. When I was four or
five and twenty my mother would have knocked me down if I had spoken
improperly to her”.
• Kirkman was speaking in 1843, as part of an investigation into the bad
behaviour of contemporary youth. Lord Ashley, speaking in the House of
Commons in the same year, argued that “the morals of the children are
tenfold worse than formerly”.
• Past generations, then, have been just as convinced as we are that the
“youth of today” were misbehaving more than ever before. Pearson has
suggested that such fears about youth are a way of expressing more
general uncertainties about social change and recur with each generation.
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