Craig Murray

TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SYMBOLIC CRIMINALISATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE

This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Fives Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.

Young People, Politics and Television

We have seen that the capacity for representative democracy to be representative of social interests other than capital is on the decline. Therefore, the rationale for popular involvement in and representation through the political process is being eroded in the minds and actions of many social groups within Western democracies, including young people. After two world wars, the winning of the popular franchise laid the basis for the social democratic Keynesian welfare state in Europe and post-Roosevelt (and later after the black civil rights struggle) a similar if somewhat watered down social democratic model in the US. The establishment of the social democratic settlement in the UK after the Second World War had removed young people from exploitation in the labour market by providing universal state education and other welfare benefits. Phil Mizen argues that young people were one of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-war strategy of inclusion (Mizen 2004:17). In underscoring the break with this strategy of inclusion and universal support inaugurated by the new neoliberal dispensation, Mizen is arguably a little uncritical of the social democratic model. The welfare state was still a compromise between capital and labour after all and the state still undertook to mould the latter to the needs of the former through its various apparatuses, such as the education system (Willis 1977).

The Crisis of Political Representation

To begin to understand why the realm of public affairs which television news reports on has a declining grip on the popular imagination, we need to situate television news within a much wider context than television journalism itself. We have to begin with the whole fabric of our political culture and what has been happening to it in recent decades if we are to understand why news about public affairs seems increasingly disconnected from the lives of various groups within society, including young people. For it ought to be clear that the crisis around watching news about public affairs is connected with the crisis around public and political life itself.

Content Analysis of Television News

Thus far we have situated the disconnection between young people, television news and politics in a number of contexts. The broadest context in which the problem can be situated is that of the relationship between news organisations, the state and the socio-economic relations of capitalism. This broader context, particularly the fundamental division between political and economic power, the subordination of political power to economic power in the era of neoliberal capitalism and the particular disenfranchisement and vulnerability of young people in this context, must be borne in mind as the essential background to any understanding of what is happening in the field of television news and its relationship to young audiences. But obviously we must move in closer to the institutions of the news broadcasters themselves to get a more detailed account of how the problems generated by these large-scale structures are conceived/perceived by broadcasters themselves and how they play out in relation to the question of young people’s disconnection from news and current affairs output.

The Monopolisation of Political Discourse

This chapter explores how television news and discussion programmes represent the world of ‘formal’ politics, which is to say the world populated by a professional class of political ‘doers’ organised within political parties, who make and implement policies within institutions that are supposed to be representative of and responsive to the public. Within a representative democracy, every voter is theoretically equal. But in practice, political power is separated from economic power. Voters vote for the former. The latter is unelectable and largely unaccountable to citizens. The story of the rise of neoliberalism is the story of how political power has become ever more subordinated and integrated into the preferences and imperatives of economic power as the social democratic/welfare state structures developed in the middle of the past century are dismantled. Inevitably, this process affects the structure of politics and the representation of that structure to the public via the media. For example, the class of political ‘doers’ operate increasingly within new party-type organisations. In the social democratic period, parties had a traditional mass base of members and were orientated towards constructing a hegemonic constituency of voters; today these ostensibly ideology-free structures operate on a declining membership base and are internally structured to minimise debate and dissent and orientate themselves towards voters as consumers, selling technocratic solutions rather than espousing ideological differences with opponents (Mair 1997: 34–8).

Apathetic or Excluded? Young People, News and the Electronic Media

The aim of this chapter is to provide an empirically detailed account of how, and to what extent, young people in the UK use the media, both old and new, to access news and current affairs. This is done by summarising those examples of detailed empirical research into this subject which have been published over the past ten years, and the conclusions which the researchers have drawn from their work. Young people’s use of the new media is a subject of considerable speculation and assertion, much of it ill-informed. This makes it all the more vital to try to form a clear picture of the way in which young people actually use the media to access news and current affairs.

Conclusion: Is Another Television News Paradigm Possible?

Television news is caught between and often combines two models of broadcasting: a patrician attachment to the formal institutions of ‘democracy’ with its formal, deferential ‘stuffy’ mode of address vs a more ‘human interest’, consumer orientated, celebrity focused and potentially (with BSkyB agitating for a change in broadcasting regulations) strongly editorialising news. These appear to be the choices open to viewers, choices shaped by the power of the state on the one hand and the market on the other. Some broadcasters think that to engage younger audiences, broadcasting needs to shift its centre of gravity from the patrician model to the market model (conceptualised as a shift from ‘hard’ news to ‘soft’ news). Yet while there is some evidence to suggest that young people have an interest in aspects of a soft news agenda, that evidence has to be interpreted carefully. For one thing, an attraction to a soft news agenda is shaped in a context in which the only other option is the austere patrician model. We should avoid falling into the trap of thinking that these are the only alternatives open to television news. The temptation to shift from hard news to soft would merely bring broadcasting even more into line with a world in which the language and culture of the market saturates everything. It would do little to empower audiences, inform audiences, give them access to a diverse range of voices and perspectives, problematise what is accepted as normal, challenge preconceived ideas and in general nourish critical faculties so that reason can prevail over some of the bizarre and irrational forces that currently shape political and economic life.

The Symbolic Criminalisation of Young people

In 2005, the Bluewater shopping mall in Kent UK banned young men from wearing ‘hoodies’ and caps (although not shops from selling them), articles of clothing that the media and politicians had increasingly associated with crime and violence (Waterhouse 2005: 16). The construction of young people as a ‘problem’ is certainly not new. As Osgerby (1997) and Pearson (1983) have shown, the demonisation of young people in the UK dates back at least to the eighteenth century and tends to rise and fall in accord with broader structural changes (and tensions) in society. In the post-Second World War era, within the context of a social democratic settlement and the establishment of a welfare state, young people were major beneficiaries of a new strategy of inclusion (Mizen 2004: 17). This post-war period certainly witnessed the creation of a veritable rogues gallery of ‘delinquent’ young people, from teddy boys, mods, rockers and skinheads through to punks, crust- ies and ravers. However, while particular subcultures of youth might be labelled within the media (and by other custodians of official morality) as ‘deviant’, they were also clearly seen as tiny minorities: precisely subcultures. Since the 1980s, with the dismantling of the welfare state, substantial deindustrialisation and the opening up of British society to global market forces, being a young person has become increasingly risky and the responsibilities for negotiating those risks have shifted away from collective provision and become highly individualised (Furlong and Cartmel 1997: 4).

Talk Back: Young Audiences and Reception

Are younger audiences interested in politics? Do they feel represented? Are media images and messages concerning young people relevant to their everyday lived experience? If not, what can be changed? There are a number of intersecting debates circulating in academic, political and broadcast arenas that have underpinned the research study discussed in this book. Concerns centre on young people’s apparent declining interest in the political process or at least traditional notions of ‘Westminster-based’ politics and fears that they are more likely to vote for reality TV contestants than in a general election (Lewis, Inthorn and Wahl-Jorgensen 2005). Yet as we discussed in Chapter 4, there is evidence that young audiences are interested in aspects of a mainstream news agenda (although not Westminster-based politics); that they also have a distinct set of interests that are particular to being young; that they are interested in ‘single issue’ politics (lobbying for change around interest-linked campaigns such as world poverty, the environment, animal rights), and that, yes, they are also inclined towards what might be called celebrity or entertainment news. We have also highlighted that young people tend to be criminalised within mainstream television news (see Chapter 5); yet ironically it is precisely these same marginalised audiences that represent the future survival of television news and within the broadcast industry there is considerable discussion about how best to attract and maintain these viewers.

The Boundaries of Political Debate: Animal Rights

According to the UK’s Office of Communications (OFCOM), television news ‘is important because it informs and educates citizens, helping them take part in the democratic process’ (OFCOM 2007c: 12). There are certainly good reasons why aspects of this proposition should be a norm to aspire to, but whether it is substantively a fact in the here and now is another question. As a norm to aspire to, effective participation in the democratic process (whether that is in periodic formal electoral politics and/or various other activities of persuasion and campaigning) requires knowledge, information and understanding of the issues involved and a grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of opposing arguments. The media in all its forms and at different scales of operation obviously play an important role in the quality and complexity of that knowledge, information and understanding. But we must suspend OFCOM’s assumption that television news (still one of the most important sources of news for the public) does this job of informing and educating effectively (from the point of view of adequately informing consent and/or dissent with this or that aspect of the social process). We must instead interrogate it. Our study unusually observed not just the daily television news bulletins but also the range of political discussion programmes that were available during the same period.