Youth Overrepresentation

There are also harmful impacts from TV news. One of these harmful impacts is the differences in how specific sexes and races are portrayed in news about adolescents. One study found that males were largely overrepresented in news stories, being three times more likely to be featured than females. This overrepresentation is also found in crime related news stories, where 80% of TV crime stories about teens involved males. Crime is the focus among all races of teens, but African Americans and Hispanics tend to fare worse than white students. The study found that nonwhite youth were represented more often as perpetrators of the crime than white youth were. It also found that minorities were underrepresented as victims of crimes while whites were overreprestented. This type of misrepresentation leads to strong stereotypes of specific races and sexes. It also tends to focus on individual acts while largely ignoring deeper causes and solutions to cime (Arnett 5). Even the commercials people view between their television shows can have subtle biases that can have a negatively skewed view of particular groups of people. For example, in a study that examined 447 commercials that featured domestic chores such as …show more content…
Oftentimes, the images are not shared beyond a small group of friends, but in some cases, the images are shared to many people. What started out seemingly innocent to a small group of people turns into something much bigger and may lead to cyberbullying. Victims of widespread sexting sometimes have emotional distress and mental health conditions that follow an incident (Schurgin O 'Keefe and