MEDIA HYPE AND STEREOTYPING

The media has become one of the most powerful tools in today’s society due to its unique ability to spread information, regardless of its validity, to the masses. Noam Chomsky, famous for his work in linguistics and activism, was quoted saying “He who controls the media, controls the minds of the public”, truly showing how powerful and dangerous the media can be. During the 1990’s, news outlets in Canada began using their power as moral entrepreneurs to spread fear amongst the population regarding youth, featuring stories about youth gang violence in order to get the public to begin to fear the youth. At the time however, the youth crime rate paled in comparison to the adult crime rate, yet the media would cover these stories as if it were the opposite. This was due to the federal government’s adoption of the Young Offenders Act in 1984, which was problematic due to its leniency on youth criminals, as the punishments they could receive were publicly deemed as not harsh enough, as well as it giving the criminal youth more rights than their victims. This act offered Canada’s young offenders too much protection from the law, thus beginning the politicalization of youth crime. By presenting the facts in a manner that exacerbated the true situation, the public would fear the youth gangs even more, which in turn would make passing legislation with more severe consequences for youth criminals in Parliament much easier. This is an example of Thomas Bernard’s “cycle of juvenile justice”, in which the government’s policies regarding juvenile offenders alternates between lenient and harsh treatments over time. When the lawmakers believes that young offenders are punished too leniently, they start to spread the belief that youth crime is rising and will continue to rise unless legal reform is made. When lawmakers and society start to believe that their mandated punishments are too severe, they associate the true reason for high juvenile crime levels as the juvenile justice system itself, and modify said punishments to be less imposing. This cycle changes between harsh and lenient punishments over time, while being completely dependent on how the media portrays the juvenile offenders. Bryan Hogeveen published a research article in 2005, outlining his perspective on how to lower the youth crime rate in Canada. Hogeveen called his approach the “punishable young offender” and is centred on the government cracking down on youth crime and enforcing harsher punishments in an attempt to deter other youth from committing crimes, saying “if we are tough on crime, if we punish crime, then people will get the message”. Hogeveen witnessed how the media had an affect on public concern when the government announced that they would be replacing the Young Offenders Act and believed similar legal reform could occur once again, with even tougher penalties this time around. If the media could portray the innocent people in the communities as victims, and the juvenile youth as evil offenders, then the public’s emotions could be controlled.

Today, the vast majority of our knowledge surrounding youth crime comes from the media, while most of the time the information being passed on to the public is taken as fact, with little or no questioning of the reliability of the report. Crime is bound to happen within society, but if the media makes it a topic that gets the attention of the masses, then the companies that control the news outlets will flood their channels with similar news reports in an attempt to make it seem as if crime has been rising. An example of this would be that the amount violence and crime being covered in Canada by news channels and other outlets has either stayed the same or has gotten even more air-time than was being shown 40 years earlier. However according to Statista Research Department, as of January 2020, Canada’s crime rate has plummeted by more than 30% since 2003. While the violence and crime has continued to drop, these statistics have not been reflected in the media’s various methods of dispersing information. After hearing news and seeing images regarding young offenders consistently, the public are now more susceptible to having their perceptions change in terms of the quantity of crimes and youth criminals. This is known as the Cultivation hypothesis, developed by George Gerbner and Larry Gross in 1976, which explains how those who view television more often are at-risk of believing the media messages being shown to them. As well, heavy television watchers could possibly be affected by Mean World Syndrome, meaning that they believe that the world is a much worse and dangerous place than it is in reality due to the media content shown to them.

The youth offenders that come from a minority background are represented in an even worse manner, as once they are racialized that individual is now considered to be a “folk devil”. This term refers to when the media portrays them as outsiders and criminals within the “normal” community, who are solely responsible for all of the issues within said community. These juvenile offenders are scapegoated by their communities and create false images surrounding these offenders that do not help or contribute in lowering youth crime rates. Not only is this unfair to the youth criminals, it also affects the law-abiding citizens that have not broken any laws. The violence and crimes being committed by the youth is associated with their ethnic and racial backgrounds, being seen as a regular occurrence for for those minorities. By seeing these crimes as a “black problem”, or “aboriginal problem”, society is completely undermining the individuals within those minorities and unfairly racially stereotyping them in order to explain why youth crime occurs. This is just one of many examples of how the media can alter perceptions regarding juvenile crime, showing just how powerful the reach of these outlets can be.

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