Bad Reputation? Newspaper Study Shows Interesting Trends About Media Coverage Of Teens

Teens and bad reputations. For a lot of people, those two things go hand in hand. That theory seemed confirmed for me one day when I was going through the newspaper and was appalled by the amount of negative articles about teens.

A few days later, when I was downtown, I saw a group of teens banging on office windows and was struck that these were the kinds of teens that give all of us a bad name.

Everyone always seems to blame the bad rep on the media, and it made me wonder just how many good things are actually said in the media about teens.

I decided to do some of my own research. I chose The Spokesman-Review as my media source and cut out all the articles about teens and youth - the good, the bad and the ugly - over the course of three months (February, March and April of 1995). I also collected the editorials by Spokesman writers and letters to the editor by Spokane residents having to do with teens or issues that affected us.

When I started, I was slightly apprehensive about what the results would be. I thought, like most people, that the overwhelming majority of the articles would be negative.

As I continued to scour the newspaper, cutting out stories, I realized there was more than just negative or positive articles - there were issues affecting teens that could be negative or positive depending on who was reading the story. There were also articles providing information that had to do with teens, but that didn’t take a position.

After a while, I divided them up into six categories. Here’s what I found.

Positive stories: These included stories that were about teens - like news of a new chicken pox vaccine or the Leadership, Education and Development (LEAD) program - and stories that directly involved teens - like the Achievements column and the Ferris High School drill team and their “silly sacks” routine.

Negative stories: These, too, involved two different types of stories. Most prevalent were articles about teens that have been victimized, such as a story about a mother who was convicted of starving her teen daughter, or another about teen murder rates rising.

The other kind of negative story was articles about teens or groups of teens who have done something negative to themselves or others. These were basically crime stories.

Neutral: This category included articles that gave information on teen issues or programs, such as increased nutrition needed by young athletes or information on computers in schools. The stories didn’t take a stand on either side.

Controversial/government: Here, I found articles about government decisions that could affect teens and are controversial in their communities, such as the Becca bill or a drug-testing kit for parents to secretly test their kids for drug use.

Opinion: This category produced the highest number of items. It included opinions expressed by newspaper readers or writers of the Review - most of them were positive in nature.

Pictures: These are called “wild art” and generally are positive. But I noticed that if you count all the pictures with kids, the vast majority of them are of young kids under 12.

In all, my search yielded 413 items. I counted and categorized them all - a lovely chore - and was very surprised and pleased by the results.

The majority of the articles were editorials and letters - and most of them were by people saying positive things about teens. The second largest was negative stories and the third was positive stories. In fact, when broken down even further, there were fewer negative crime stories than positive stories about teens doing good things.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the negative articles are what people remember and the newspaper, at least the Spokesman, is not responsible for the negative reputation that teens have. Instead, it’s what people see and remember.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IN THE NEWS Beth Raddatz conducted a threemonth survey of The SpokesmanReview last year to determine once and for all what kind of coverage teens get. Here are the results: Positive stories: 17.8 percent Negative stories: 29 percent Neutral: 5.1 percent Editorials: 31.4 percent Photos: 5.3 percent Government issues: 10.4 percent Miscellaneous: 1 percent