Can you think of a good reason why you would put the UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, a bunch of adult journalists, the heads of the World's leading children's organisations, a load of middle-aged men in suits and two young reporters from Children's Express in the same room for over five hours?
Well, there are lots of reasons why last October we all met in Bath to discuss children's rights and press freedom. You would think that we'd all be able to agree on how to stop the negative portray! of young people in the media but unfortunately it wasn't quite so simple. But it's not surprising as it's a really big issue.
Before we went to the conference we did quite a bit of research on the subject We were shocked when we read the statistics - 71% of press stories about young people are negative, 33% of them are only concerned with crime and only 8% of stories about young people carry quotes from young people themselves.
With such alarming figures we were really keen to push this point at the conference and were lucky enough to get an interview with Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. We asked her what she thought about the way young people are represented in the media:
"By and large I think the representation of children is fine and within the terms of the code that newspapers are intended to operate,"
For a moment we wondered if she ever read the papers but she went on to say:
"I sometimes think children and young people are presented too much as the source of the problem: they focus on children who get into trouble."
Lynn Geldof, the Regional Communicators Adviser for UNICEF also spoke about the issue and told the conference:
'The representation of children in the mass media today is a problem. We do not hear enough from the children and the young people themselves. This situation is harming them and doing society no favours."
What about the people who actually report the news? The BBC journalist John Sweeney said the media are like white blood cells, if everything is okay then you are fine but if it's not then you are in trouble. "We're interested when things go wrong. That's the nature of the media, we don't do good stories."
The people we spoke to all seemed to agree with us, that the way we (young people) are stereotyped is something that needs to be changed but the big question is how?
Tessa Jowell seemed to think that it was organisations like Children's Express that could make the difference.
We agree that at Children's Express we are in a good position to do this, but unfortunately we cannot do this alone. We would like editors, particularly of the tabloid press, to change the way they report on young people in their papers.
Let's have less of the "yobs attack teachers" and more of the "young person wins science and technology robotics award" please!
About the team
This story was produced by Samantha, 13 and Samir, 16. It was published by G-Nation.
