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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Bashing Youth By Mike Males "Unplanned pregnancies. HIV infection and AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases. Cigarettes, alcohol and drug abuse. Eating disorders. Violence. Suicide. Car crashes." The 21-word lead-in to a Washington Post (12/22/92) report sums up today's media image of the teenager: 30 million 12- through 19-year-olds toward whom any sort of moralizing and punishment can be safely directed, by liberals and conservatives alike. Today's media portrayals of teens employ the same stereotypes once openly applied to unpopular racial and ethnic groups: violent, reckless, hypersexed, welfare-draining, obnoxious, ignorant. And like traditional stereotypes, the modern media teenager is a distorted image, derived from the dire fictions promoted by official agencies and interest groups. During the 1980s and 1990s, various public and private entrepreneurs realized that the news media will circulate practically anything negative about teens, no matter how spurious. A few examples among many: * In 1985, the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals,defending the profitable mass commitment of teenagers to psychiatric treatment on vague diagnoses, invented the "fact" that a teenager commits suicide "every 90 minutes"--or 5,000 to 6,000 times every year. Countless media reports of all types, from the Associated Press (4/4/91) to Psychology Today (5/92), continue to report this phony figure, nearly three times the true teen suicide toll, which averaged 2,050 per year during the 1980s (Vital Statistics of the United States). To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1224 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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