Throughout the selection of newspapers and news reports I have looked at in relation to the London riots there has only been one news reports in which a reporter interviewed a friend of Mark Duggan, he explained that they all had reasons for starting these riots and taking part in them because Mark was killed unnecessarily by police and the situation could have been dealt with in a more professional and reasonable manner as police are supposed to be saving lives and keeping people away from danger not creating problems themselves. Although rioting may have been too much of a situation to have been caused over a single mans death I do understand where the young youth was coming from because he is only trying to show his respects to his friend along with the rest of the 'youths' and trying to show the police force that what they did was wrong and some things need to be shown in serious situations before they are realised to have affected so many people. I think this did make the police more aware of what they had done and the percentage of people they had affected in the process, it may have been another reason why they didn't intervene with much of the looting, attacks e.t.c
However the youth only got around 10 seconds air time and was then cut off to go onto a reporters voice again, this shows they still don't really give the youths a chance to explain as the rest of my research I found didn't give the youths any chance to express their feelings on the matter they just made the assumptions around what they believed to be the 'real truth' but personally I think if reporters want the public to engage with this situation they should give a balanced argument and show the real opinions and feedback from two sides; the police and the youths so then they can decide who to believe on the feedback given. It was quite disappointing that I didn't come across anymore articles giving the youths personal feelings about the riots as I think it would have been a lot more interesting to analyse and work out why the problems escalated so much into a violent frenzy.
Given the general framing of young people as the key participants in the events, how much space was given to young people's voices - and what sorts of young people were given space to respond in the media debates?
Throughout my research part of this task; looking for specific reports/news bulletins to analyse I didn't come across a huge amount that let 'youths give their voice', the main one was the one I discussed above about the youth who explained that Mark Duggan was a close friend and him and he's group of friends were showing there support of him agaisnt the police by causing some of this trouble, although it is bad what they did he was truthful and I do believe he had every reason to react, maybe just not as bad as they did because it didn't just effect the police it affected local people and the areas that they live in. The other reports I have looked at (mainly news interviews) did have a few youths speaking out, however they used the people who many would stereotype as the typical 'chav' they were speaking with very bad language and had a negative tone to there voices discussing the fact that they don't care who and what they have upset or attacked they just wanted to get there own back, however each one of them was covered with a face mask to hide their identity from the police, this tells me they are all embarrassed of what they have done to these places and personally I think they are putting on a 'tough' act to the cameras as they know how they are being portrayed in the media so they are trying to live up to that name, this is not a good sign for some of the people the same age as these youths because they could be branded in a negative light just because of the way these people have behaved in front of the news reporters, some of the youths who had no impact into these riots are still getting on with their usual teenage lifestyle sticking in at school, behaving mature e.t.c but none of this is ever noticed by the mass media they always just dwell on the negative side, this is were Stan Cohen's theory comes into action as he explains about DEVIANCE AMPLIFICATION - this means the deviants are in fact the youths themselves 'behaving badly' throughout these riots (just for an example) and the amplification part of he's theory is referring back to the mass media (newspapers, magazines, news broadcasts e.t.c) as they all "amplify" the situation to make it sound a lot worse to draw in the attention of viewers. This is exactly what I have found throughout my research as the media debates do not make any sort of room for these 'youths' and instead make their own personal judgments so Stan Cohen's idea definitely reflects and backs up my research analysis well.
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