Marketing Violence to Young People
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
No one knows better than communications industries that children and youth represent a huge market, due to both their own spending power and their influence on family spending decisions.
As concerned adults, we also need to recognize when our anxieties about media violence are used to sell us on blanket censorship, ideology, and a variety of products.
More than anything else in media, news coverage influences what people and which issues are part of the national conversation and how those issues are talked about.[1] When it comes to Indigenous people and communities, constitutional issues, forest fires, poverty, sexual abuse and drug addiction sometimes appear to be the only topics are reported in the news.
That Indigenous women are likely to be victims of violence is not news: Indigenous women aged 25 to 44 are five times more likely to suffer a violent death than other women in Canada.
Media Coverage of Disability Issues: Persons with disabilities receive similar treatment in the news.
Media producers have recognized that they must make efforts to better represent persons with disabilities.
In this lesson, students explore the gratuitous use of violence in sports.
Persons with disabilities might best be described, in the media at least, as an invisible minority: though a large segment of the population has a physical or mental disability they have been almost entirely absent from the mass media until recent years. Moreover, when persons with disabilities appear they almost always do so in stereotyped roles.
Part of stereotyping is the attitude that all members of a particular group are the same, or else fall into a very small number of types. This is particularly true in the few cases where persons with a disability appear in media