I
admit, in high school, I took a course in media. At the
time I didn’t understand the relevance of the class
and truthfully I only took the class for the credit, but
I did learn a lot from the class. Media has always had
positive and negative affects in everyday society, but
many argue that the affects of media for this generation
of youth is much worse than it was only one generation
ago. In order to get a better view of the effects of media
on today’s youth we asked some media insiders about
their views. Are the youth of today’s generation
really being seduced by the negative that media has to
offer? Is media getting bigger, better and providing our
youth with advancements they never had before? Read on
to see what the experts have to say.
| Most general dictionaries
define media as a conglomerate of different mass communications.
Of those medium, the most popular and the ones used
for this article are radio, television, print journalism,
and web/internet. Advertising is another popular and
very important medium but it was too much to cover
for these purposes. For purposes of this article
youth will be classified as ages of 13 and 21. |
More
Reading:
|
Media is both good and bad but it all depends on the company. Media’s
there for spreading out the news and sometimes it can
dominate your thought process and that can be bad too.
Newspapers and magazines have a great influence on youth.
From daily newspapers like Daily News and The Post to
money machines such as XXL and People, print journalism
is all about bringing news to a reader. A lot of the time
print journalism can be sensational journalism. With magazines
such as US Weekly and many times even The Post, shock
value sells, so at the end of the day that is what they
are trying to get out there. Although they may also provide
news and current events the key aspect is selling and
making the most advertising dollars. In New York one of
the most straight news publications is New York’s
Daily News. The paper still features a gossip column and
an advice column but their journalism is usually straight
unbiased news. Errol Louis is the former associate editor
of The New York Sun and currently serves as staff writer
for the Daily News, he was born in Harlem, raised in New
Rochelle and currently lives in Crown Heights. Louis has
been writing for the Daily News since 2004 focusing in
politics and editorials.
When he was a child the
biggest radio station in America was AM 77, a top 40 station.
He grew up reading the two daily newspapers, The Times
and The Daily News and like any other child he watched
television as often as he could. “I was a television
addict watching three or four hours of television everyday.
This was at a time before cable. I think I sampled e
verything
popular culture had to offer in the 1970’s.”
He watched the news, cartoons, and everything else on
television because really there wasn’t much on to begin
with.
Since
Louis was a child, media has changed drastically. “Different
Media have different levels of affect. The field that
I work in probably has less affect than radio, television
and the Internet, that’s what the studies all seem
to suggest. For the youth there are a lot more choices
than when I was young as far as what they will and won't
listen to. People now have all kinds of choices including
pod casting and satellite radio."
Does he feel that
media is positive or negative? "I think that depends
on what people do with it.
They’re swimming today in an ocean of information
and images. As in the real ocean if you move too far out
or you get caught in a storm or a whirlpool you suffer
the worst possible affects. On the other hand if you know
how to swim and you know where you’re going, it
can be a wonderful experience. I don’t think you
can call it good or bad it just depends on what you do
with it.” Louis believes that the question really
becomes are young people being trained on how to make
good choices with the media they receive. “Channel
One was an experiment putting channels in the classroom-this
didn’t happen in New York-they found that the kids
remembered the ads, but didn’t remember none of
the educational content. How do you teach people how to
sort out what is information from what is just noise?”
Good point.
Iesha Sekou is a radio personality for WHCR radio, 90.3
F.M. in Manhattan. She grew up in the Bronx with four
siblings, taking in media like most people. For the most
part she took in television, not listening to the radio
unless she was going on a long trip with the family. Television
affected what she felt about the world much like it does
now with teens. “I used to watch movies like Superman
and I used to believe that white people had super powers,”
Sekou explained. As far as radio and it’s affects
on youth now, she feels there is very little positive especially
with radio shows like the Wendy Williams Show which she
says “is borderline soft porn.” I think the
media right now is having a negative affect, because of
the images they have and the programming is not positive.
People in radio sometimes feel they don’t have to
be responsible.”
Christopher Glorioso was born and raised in Maryland.
He attended Syracuse University and studied at Oxford
England. He has worked in television at Pittsburgh’s
ABC News affiliate and a little over a year ago he joined
the newscast at WB 11. Working in television, possibly
the biggest medium affecting youth, Glorioso feels that
young adults don’t really watch news-and that may
be the biggest problem with media. Since he was a young
adult “the biggest change in media is the ability
of a viewer to tailor his or her interest to such a specific
topic that they sometimes miss the topics that used to unite
us all. If we are only interested in hip-hop then people
only watch hip-hop programming. If you are only interested
in Spanish language television you only watch Spanish
language television. We don’t have lot of commonality
in our culture we only have a lot of differences. If you
don’t want to watch any news you don’t have
to. I think it’s important for parents and teachers
to insist that their kids watch the news.” When
Glorioso was younger, the news was on at seven o’clock
and there wasn’t much else to watch. “There
were only 23 cable channels and when I was really younger
there was no cable. Now there are hundreds of cable channels.”
The Internet, the newest medium to make a huge impact
on the youth may also have the most negative impact. Davon
Paul the owner of www.rappinglounge.com, an entertainment
website and the youngest of our media experts feels that
the web is a great means for getting information. He understands
however that not everyone uses the web for good. Paul
is only 17 years old himself.Our experts all seemed to agree
that media is all about the way you use it, the experience
can vary depending on what your purposes are. But what
do the young people have to say? 
“Media has a negative affect on the youth of today
it portrays sex as something that is done casually and
doesn’t have any consequences,” says Jaylene
Clark, 18 of Harlem. “It makes teens believe that
in order to be popular you have to have the best things
and it makes people become superficial. The music videos
are the worst; the media affect on young girls is sickening.
The image of beauty is unrealistic; she is 5’5,
light skin, skinny with long straight hair. If you don’t
look like that a lot of women resort to bulimia and anorexia,” she continued.
Kevin Weston editor of Yo! Outlook, a youth literary journal
in the Bay Area of California says, “It depends.
If you look at it from the consumer’s point of view
a lot of times it has a negative affect more than a positive
affect, but for youth who create media you can look at
it from a more critical aspect. It will probably have
a more positive affect. If you are making media you are
able to affect what your peers see.”
It seems clear, media is about options. It is what you
make it. If young adults chose to take the positive they
can do just that and if they chose to take the negative
they can do that all the same. However the problem may simply
be that young adults are too easily affected by the harms
of media.
