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MAPPING NEWS ON CHILDREN IN THEMAINSTREAM PRESSCristina Ponte aa Departamento de Ciências da Comunicação, Universidade Nova de Lisboa,Lisbon, Portugal

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007To cite this Article: Ponte, Cristina (2007) 'MAPPING NEWS ON CHILDREN IN THEMAINSTREAM PRESS', European Societies, 9:5, 735 - 754To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14616690701412855URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616690701412855

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MAPPING NEWS ON CHILDREN IN THEMAINSTREAM PRESS

Cristina PonteDepartamento de Ciencias da Comunicacao, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Rua Fernando Namora, 36, 7.

dt, 1600-453 Lisbon, Portugal

ABSTRACT: Research on the ways children are presented in the mainstream

news media has recently become a focus of attention in Media Studies,stressing news approaches that oscillate between demonizing children and

picturing them as a powerful symbol of victimization. Furthermore, children

themselves do not make any statements: they are simply not heard.

Similarly, there is an emphasis on episodic events, imbued with emotional or

moral components. There is also a focus on risk situations, delinquency or

parental advice on how to deal with new generations. This contrasts with

little attention being paid to economic and social policies based on the UN

Convention on the Rights of the Child. Based on these ambivalences, alongitudinal analysis of Portuguese newspapers (1970�2000) and a

comparative analysis of European newspapers during a week in 2000, have

been carried out in order to determine what and how they report children and

related issues, and what frames have been changed or maintained.

Consequently, the article explores the many facets of reporting and the

implications for our public life, particularly with regards to children.

Key words: children in the news; news-values; journalism; childhood

1. Introduction

Communication research on children and media has largely focused on

possible media effects on children and on access and uses of the media by

children themselves. However, little attention has been paid to the ways

children are (re)presented in the news media.1

In the news, children tend to be presented as the greatest victims of

wars, accidents or natural disasters, but this pattern is not enough to

1. The International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media archives shows that most

of this research started to be published in the late 1990s (http://www.nordicom.gu.

se/clearinghouse.php)

DOI: 10.1080/14616690701412855 735

European Societies9(5) 2007: 735�/754

– 2007Taylor & Francis

ISSN1461-6696 print

1469-8307 online

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understand other stories involving children and how and why they have

been increasing in recent years. The purpose of this article is to analyse

how media logics consider young people in the news.The picture that James and James (2003: 10�/11) present of the UK may

be extended to other developed nations. Images of children that circulate

around the media reveal a deep-rooted ambivalence about the nature of

childhood and, by implication, of children themselves. On one hand,

children are considered an audience to be wooed and enticed by the

market industries, not only for what they represent now but also as future

consumers. On the other hand, for political authorities children seem to

represent an ever-present danger to the moral fabric of contemporary

society, as a social group in need of control and containment, while parents

are accused of fostering cycles of disrespect among their children,

attitudes that manifest themselves at school in ill-disciplined pupil

behaviour.This ambivalence shows the paradoxes in contemporary societies

regarding adult expectations concerning children, stressed by Qvortrup

(1994): adults would like to have children but contemporary societies and

professional conditions do not facilitate this desire, they spend less and

less time together, economic decisions do not place children as a priority

and so on. Although child-related issues are social and political too, they

tend to be considered as belonging only to the private sphere of the family,

in contemporary risk societies, where globalization and individualization

go side by side (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Prout 2005).Childhood policies addressing children as subjects, as printed in the

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), are still not common in

top-level politics. Illustrating this gap, in the most developed countries,

including European industrialized ones, the number of children has

decreased while the number of children in poverty has increased. In the

last decade, the number of children living in poverty rose in 17 out of 24

industrialized countries, some of them European.2 While European child

poverty is scarcely mentioned in the public discourse, the increasing

public debate on sexual abuse involving children is one of the major

changes affecting childhood representations in contemporary risk societies

(e.g., Qvortrup 1994; Jackson and Scott 1999). Beginning in Anglo-

American countries in the 1980s, this issue is today more common in other

European countries. Debate has also increased on physical injury, the

2. European countries where child poverty rates rose in the 1990s are Finland, Denmark,

Sweden, The Netherlands, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal,

Belgium, Czech Republic, Luxembourg and Poland (Innocent Report Card, UNICEF,

Issue no. 6, p. 7).

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leading cause of death of children under the age of 14 in every singleindustrialized country.3

Mapping the presence of children in the news may contribute to anenlargement of the public debate, not only on the social conditions ofchildren in contemporary societies but also on journalism and humanrights.

1.1. Enlarging the research agenda in journalism studies

As Zelizer points out, ‘journalism has been primarily defined in terms ofonly a small (and decreasing) dimension of news-making �/ hard news, andthis has created a bias that undermines scholars? capacity to embracejournalism in all of its different forms, venues and practices’ (2004: 6). Innews on children, hard news can be found as well as mere human-intereststories, and this coexistence may draw attention to the different kind ofnarratives used in journalism.

The theoretical approach presented by John Hartley (1998: 62) thatcontrasts modern and post modern news narratives may be interesting for anempirical analysis of news concerning children. The author contrasts thefour classical meta-narratives that organize news (conflict, progress,competition and accidents) with post-modern narratives, including: adviceon personal or ethical qualities for self, home or social improvement;cordiality stories, promoting basic information rather than a ‘catalogue ofanomalies’ or ‘accidents’; an orientation to a private sphere, wherereaderships are addressed as consumers/clients seeking entertainmentfor satisfaction of wants; identity, based on items centred on the idea of awe community.

These different meta-narratives may be linked to Daniel Hallin’s publicspheres that sustain the news: the sphere of legitimate controversy, thesphere of consensus and the sphere of deviance (Hallin 1986), which is alsoassociated with different styles of news coverage, as Schudson (2000: 193�/

4) says: ‘Reporters who may adhere to norms of objectivity in reporting ona political campaign will not blink to report gushingly about a topic onwhich there is broad national consensus or to write derisively on a subjectthat lies beyond the bounds of popular consensus. It is as if journalistswere unconsciously multilingual, code switching from neutral interpretersto guardians of social consensus and back again without missing a beat’.

3. In Portugal and the US the rate of child deaths through injury is more than twice the

level of the leading countries with the lowest levels, Sweden, the UK, Italy and The

Netherlands (UNICEF 2001).

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This code-switching can be found in news reporting on children andyoung people and their related issues, due to their symbolic references.For instance, crimes committed by children, such as the murder of thetoddler, James Bulger, in the UK in 1993, presented an opportunity for amoral campaign, and journalists moved beyond their attack on the ten-year-old boys, ‘to offer a new definition of the very nature of childhood:the ‘‘innocent angels’’ of an earlier social construction of childhood werereplaced by ‘‘little demons’’’ (Franklin and Petley 1996: 134). On the otherhand, human-interest stories on child victims of catastrophes or wars fillnewspapers and screens, creating an emotional consensus about who arethe greatest victims, the perfect innocent. As Moeller says (2002: 39),‘children are a synecdoche for a country’s future, for the political andsocial well-being of a culture’. In international news, she notes how ‘afocus on children serves a logistical function. Since children areubiquitous in societies across the globe, they are always, and quickly,accessible news pegs’ (Idem).

Children and their symbolic value provide ‘eternal stories’ for news.Like myths, Lule (2001) says, news offers a steady repetition of stories, therhythmic recurrence of themes and events. Myths and news tell real andpublic stories and use fundamental stories to instruct and inform. Basedon this perspective, if the innocent and dependent chid is the dominant storyin modern societies, there is also the black sheep child; the child in conflictwith the law, for instance, that does not correspond to the romantic ideal ofchildhood as a time of innocence and dependence.

2. Children in the news in contemporary societies

Following the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), since the1990s, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has producedreports and guidelines on children’s rights, together with UNICEF andgrassroots organizations. The report; ‘Information and Child Rights, theChallenge of Media Engagement’ (1998), for instance, points to the ‘humaninterest story’ as a dramatic device to capture people’s interest and soexplain a wider truth. In this way, the content should go beyond commonsense: ‘If stories about children are to illustrate a ‘‘truth’’, journalists needto know what lies behind the experiences they are writing about. Thatincludes appreciating the rights of the children involved �/ their right tosecurity and (even) anonymity, knowing about the laws and conventionsthat exist to protect them and being free to investigate any breach of thoserights’ (IFJ 1998: 8).

In spite of these ethical approaches, an international survey of 55 Codesof Conduct showed that few of them specifically mention children’s rights

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or provide guidance on how child-related issues should be dealt with.

Many professionals consider the use of common sense as being sufficient

when dealing with ethical issues. This results in the reproduction of

cultural stereotypes, where children tend to be represented as victims,

villains, or as ‘cute’ attachments to adults.Research from different parts of the world illustrates the gap between

the perspectives of IFJ and children advocates, and those reflected in

everyday professional routines.In the US, research on children in the news showed that their visibility

is associated with the increasing commercialism of the 1980s as well as the

so-called civic journalism and its notion of journalists reconnecting with

communities and becoming participants in public problem-solving in the

1990s. Relationships between civic journalism and commercial trends and

how they address their audience(s) are not explored here, but both may

have contributed to the kidsbeat in newsrooms, a growing attention on the

child. In the early 1990s, US newsprint and broadcast projects focusing on

children popped up everywhere.4

As Moeller stresses (2002: 38), ‘the move toward civic journalism has

created a focus on at-risk children; the financial imperatives of many

media institutions make them eager to attract women, who are, as a group,

considered to be interested in children and related issues; the baby boomer

generation in power in many newsrooms has been attracted toward stories

that resonate personally, and the many major journalism awards won by

stories featuring children have encouraged other journalists to also take up

children’s issues’.Some projects have been criticized for creating pressure for misguided

public policy solutions, while polls show the public has scant under-

standing of the factors that contribute to the headlines on violence, teen

pregnancy and child abuse. This is the case of the critical report produced

by a collaborative project involving media researchers and a youth-led

South Bronx organizing group, that considered the New York Times front-

page series, Children of the Shadows (1995). They found that the series

focused almost exclusively on children of colour, over-represented young

people as delinquents and sub-represented them as victims, discussed

violence without an acknowledgement of social and economic contexts,

4. In 1993, Killing our Children, a Chicago Tribune long-term campaign, involved 75

journalists and 35 photographers and artists who worked on reports about the victims

of urban violence under the age of 15. The newspaper’s editorials on this issue

received a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Yet, children’s advocates considered this campaign

as ‘paternal journalism, covering kids without giving them their own voice’ (Trost

1996: 55).

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presented no alternatives for imprisonment, repeatedly utilized a singleperspective story and stressed race as a factor of differentiation.5

Children Now, a project coordinated by Kunkel et al. (1999) thatcompared the news media’s representation of children in 1993 and 1998showed that the most significant change was a reduction in the media’semphasis on crime/violence news and a notorious rise in family stories andhealth/Safety. Thus, a focus on the home replaced the focus on the streets,while economic issues were always least reported. This study demonstrateda high degree of consistency in news forms: the predominance of shorttexts, the prevalent use of statistics as well as institutional and establishedspecialized sources (namely psychologists), and scarcity of informationgathered from children themselves.

In an analysis of the media logic and entertainment format in the mainUS newspapers for a decade (1987�/1996), David Altheide (2002) showshow children and the spaces they occupy have been increasingly includedin a ‘discourse of fear’ and how fear has moved from the news sectionsabout specific events to other sections of the newspaper, including advicein soft narratives. The author notes a shift from ‘a focused and morespecific use of fear to a discourse emphasizing general, pervasive, andunfocused fear’ and suggests that this discourse is particularly importantfor everyday social interaction when it involves children (Altheide 2002:230�/1): ‘Children play a dual role in terms of innocence and brutality,protection and control. We can justify excess in protecting children, andincreasingly, we can excuse excess in punishing them, particularly �/ andparadoxically �/ if extreme sanctions will protect the innocence ofchildren’.

Prevalence of the format of news coverage as either ‘episodic’ or‘thematic’ (Iyengar 1991: 13�/14) is particularly visible in the way newsmedia frame youth crime in terms of individual responsibility andprovides a context that promotes a focus on punishment.6 Advocates ofharsher penalties are helped by the episodic routine news styles ofreporting. Only particularly traumatic cases, such as the Columbine HighSchool events gave rise, for a few days, to thematic frames as an alternativeto simple factual reporting, returning to the usual frames when coveragewent back to the routine, as shown by the Berkeley Media Studies Group(McManus and Dorfman 2002).

In Asia, the Children in the News study (Goonasekera 2001) assessed thepresence of children and related issues in 13 Asian countries in 1999(Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan,

5. Report We Interrupt This Message (http://www.interrupt.org/inbetweenthelines.

html), accessed 11.05.05.

6. http://www.interrupt.org/soundbytesandcellblocks.html (access: 11.05.05).

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the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam), aiming todetermine the extent to which Asian media professionals incorporated theUN Convention on Child’s Rights and the guidelines from the IFJ intotheir practices.

While millions of Asian children live in cultural, political and economicenvironments that ignore their basic rights, media professionals justifiedthe absence of news on children through references to ‘professionalcriteria’ and the fact that children’s coverage is contingent upon theirinvolvement in other newsworthy events, namely sports, education orhuman interest stories.

In the less industrialized Asian countries, topics tend to focus mostly onparental advice on health care or education. When children are victims ofabuse, violence, rape or murder, the media tend to sensationalize the story.Full identity of the suspects and victims (including photos) is seen asshowing the ‘accuracy of the facts’. This news culture focuses on the storyas a fact and the right to inform, and overrides other rights, such as theright to privacy. In industrialized countries, such as Japan or Singapore,the most recurrent topics coincide with those in the US: crime involvingchildren and education.

In South Africa, a nation where 39.4 per cent of the population is underthe age of 18 and 10.6 per cent under the age of 5 (UNICEF 2003), theEmpowering Children and the Media Project monitored how childrenwere represented in the news media and the implications for their rights.In 2003, over a period of three months, the project analysed more than22,000 items, from print, radio and television media, identifying those thatcontained references to a child/children. Results from the final reportshow that only 6 per cent of all monitored news items mentioned children,whilst their newsworthiness seems to have been defined by the extremeand/or dramatic nature of the stories.

As in the US collaborative projects that involve media researchers andyoung people in news analyses, pointed above, a part of this project wasthe participation of children themselves, who were engaged in a parallelmonitoring project for two weeks. This allowed them to express what theysaw and to debate how the media represented them. In this way, theyactively participated in social life and also produced useful information onthemselves as social agents, both for media professionals and researchers.

Another non-European monitoring of media coverage on childrencomes from Latin America. In Brazil, where 33.8 per cent of thepopulation is under the age of 18 and 9.3 per cent is under the age of5, a new legal approach concerning children and adolescents wasintroduced in 1990, associated with the political democratization thattook place in the late 1980s. Since 1993, ANDI (a News Agency forChildren’s Rights, promoted by media professionals) has been acting as a

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centre of reference where journalists can identify stories, reporting

methods and access the most up-to-date sources of information. Itsmain aim is to promote quality journalism that is able to contribute to the

democratic accountability of the political power. ANDI also considers thatorganized civil society needs to be involved in the accountability of the

media, and so this News Agency works not only with journalists andmedia professionals but also with grassroots movements, explaining the

logic of news production, its time schedules and professional routines.ANDI argues that quality journalism should involve the production of

solutions-oriented news, which does not mean partisan journalism. In theirwords, items considered solution-oriented are those that: (1) present

successful social projects; (2) denounce problematic situations, but includefacts or ideas that lead to a reflection about possible solutions; (3) promote

debates among sectors; (4) provide explanations on legal issues or lawsapproved at local, state or federal level; (5) results from field research,from civil or governmental entities; (6) cooperate with social assistance

campaigns; and (7) focus on existing or possible solutions for them, ineditorials and articles. Police interventions, governmental promises or

projects without assured financial support are excluded.ANDI carried out daily monitoring of 56 of the most relevant Brazilian

newspapers since 1996, and discusses the results with journalists,promoting feedback, and these media awareness debates are then

incorporated in accessible non-academic books. Another strategy devel-oped by ANDI to increase awareness in newsrooms is annual evaluations

of the most important Brazilian newspapers and magazines, which mayhave contributed to competition between newsrooms (ANDI 2000).

Data from this long-term work demonstrate an impressive increase inthe number of news items (from 10 thousand in 1996 to almost 160

thousand in 2004), and a stronger presence of non-official informationsources. With regards to the presentation of more solutions-oriented

items, news items on Education and Human Rights are the most frequent,while Violence is the least frequent in this category. Presently, news on

sexual abuse refers more to children’s rights, legislation and statistics thanin the first years of this monitoring (Godoi 2005).

Due to its social impact in allowing increased participation in the newsfrom grassroots movements and a more sensitive attention to children’s

issues, ANDI monitoring and training models are now adopted in otherLatin America countries (Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela,Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia and Equator), supported by

UNICEF. Accion 17 is the name of a virtual web of communicators andjournalists, evoking the article of the UN Convention, on children’s rights

to access appropriate information.

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3. Children and related issues in Portuguese newspapers: an overview(1970�2000)

Portugal, one of the EU countries with the lowest GDP, has experienced asignificant change in recent decades and some figures show the speed andsocial impact of the modernization process. Nowadays, the country hasone of the lowest mortality rates of children under the age of 5 (5/1,000)in the world, while in the 1960s it was 112/1,000. In 1970, the medicallyassisted birth rate in hospitals represented only 37.5 per cent of new-borns, while in 1994 it had risen to 98.9 per cent (Barreto 1996).

In most aspects of social life in the early 1970s, Portugal was a pre-modern country. Salazar, the Prime Minister and the person who had heldpolitical power since 1928, had resisted industrialization and consideredhigh levels of literacy and education as a danger to the public order. Themilitary revolution, which took place in April 1974, was a turning pointwith regards to civil rights, and a contribution to the consolidation of awelfare state that had started shyly in the last years of the dictatorshipnever reached the standards of other European countries.

Although economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s hampered necessarychanges in basic living conditions, Portugal presents a very differentpicture nowadays. Since it became a member of the European Union in1986, it has changed drastically, mostly in social terms, as the statisticsshow. However, in spite of individualization, urbanization and other signsof modernity and late modernity, it still remains a pre-modern country inseveral respects.

As far as children are concerned, the sociologist Ana Nunes de Almeida(2000: 61�/2) pointed out the prevailing co-existence of three differenttimes in Portuguese contemporary society: pre-modern times, where thechild is seen as an adult in miniature, abandoning school at an early age,starting to work without qualifications and with no access to basic care;modern times, in which families have an only child who is surrounded byparents and grandparents, who lives ‘the longest compulsory childhoodever seen’, to quote Leach; post-modern times, in which the cosmopolitanchild easily deals with technological devices and uses English as thelanguage to establish contact with the global world.

3.1. Methodological approach

A long-term period (1970�/2000) makes it possible to look at what waspublished concerning children under the age of 14 and related issues inthe same newspaper under different political and social conditions. Diariode Notıcias (DN), edited since 1864, was chosen due to the fact that its

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history is strongly connected with that of Portuguese society and itsdynamics.

The analysis of all the printed DN editions at five-yearly intervalsshows what kind of news was presented in different political and socialcontexts. In fact, looking at all the editions of each year provides anextensive picture about what has or has not been published, and the ways ofwriting and editing this news: position, relevance and possible connectionswith other news content.

A quantitative content analysis is used to identify patterns in newscoverage during the period 1970�/2000 and also make detailed compar-isons between different newspapers’ output in 2000. Tools of criticaldiscourse analysis, which focuses on relevant parts of the news items, suchas the headlines, images and voices heard, make it possible to understandhow children were presented in the news, through words and images(Kress 1986; van Dijk 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Interviewswith former and practising journalists provided contextual informationabout newsroom routines.

A comparison was made with another Portuguese quality newspaper,Publico, for the year 2000. This way, it is possible to compare newsagendas; what kind of events were covered by both media and whatdifferences were found. Furthermore, comparisons were made with otherEuropean quality newspapers for a one-week time-period. Spanish,French and British newspapers were chosen because of similarities intheir quality profile and the researchers’ mastery of foreign languagesinvolved. The print editions of El Pais, Le Monde and The Guardian(European edition) published in the first week of October 2000 were thuscompared with the editions of Publico and DN in the same period. Thismade it possible to present some comparative data on national andinternational news on children (Ponte 2002, 2005).

3.2. Results: distinct and common trends

The years under analysis are marked by different political and socialconditions that affected the place and value of children in the news. In1970, without press freedom, DN was a newspaper quite deferential to thepolitical regime. In 1975, one year after the ‘Red Carnation Revolution’,Portugal existed in a heated political moment, and DN was under theinfluence of the Communist Party most of the year. In 1980, 1985 and1990 DN was part of the state owned social communication system and in1982 was considered by UNESCO as an example of a quality newspaper.In 1995 and 2000, DN was part of one of the most important private

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media groups; resulting in a modern design and content that may be

considered similar to other European quality newspapers.Figure 1 presents the total of news items reached each year in DN.The total of news items in 1970 and 2000 are similar. However, in 1970,

67.8 per cent of the items were brief news (short texts, 1�/3 paragraphs),

whereas in 2000 this form, still the main category, represents just 35 per

cent of the total, suggesting that the brief text item is always the dominant

form in this type of news coverage.Contextual and the discursive analyses of the texts and images add

further meaning to these values.In 1970, 45.2 per cent of brief news items reported children as victims

of accidents. Villages and poor suburbs were the dominant locations for

these events, affecting mostly working-class children. Children were

named and presented as innocent, unfortunate and victims of fate. The

second most frequent type of story was Child and Care (10.6 per cent),

which referred to religious and private charity, including the newspaper

itself as promoter of private donations. The third main category (8.6 per

cent) was The Abandoned and Neglected Child, usually referring to badmothers in moral tones.

There was no social context found in this news, instead the focus was on

local events. Despite the fact that 37.5 per cent of children failed their first

school year and only 18 per cent finished the first cycle of schooling

without any failure (Barreto 1996), education is an absent subject: just six

items were found, mostly on the front pages, associated with the opening

of the new school year in a propaganda style: Something new in Portugal: amillion children in primary schools.7 The pre-modern place of education is

visible in the language of news on accidents involving children alone at

Children in news items661

252 282 298

407 431

660

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Figure 1. Children in news items.

7. DN, October 8, 1970.

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home. For instance, a baby was raped because the parents were working in thefields and the older sister, who was looking after her, had to go to school.8

International items from wire-services (19.1 per cent) mainly presentedaccidents, injuries and situations involving child-neglect, suggesting thatthese kinds of events occur everywhere, even in developed Europeancountries. A European country that supported the liberation movementsin Africa made this front page headline, The Netherlands: ten children die ofinjury per month.9 On the front pages it was also common to find images of‘Olympic children’10 with their royal or artist parents. The Missing Childstory is a recurrent theme, while political content is also covered withregards to the iron curtain countries: Juvenile delinquency grows inCzechoslovak: School says communism is good; at home, parents show thatit is bad.11 News items about the Child of Science, involving discussionsabout the first experiences of artificial insemination were presented undercontradictory frames (a victory of science that is against the Christianmorals).12

In 1975, the 252 news items focusing on children constitute the lowestfrequency of coverage during the time period examined (see Figure 1).Children and their issues were clearly off the heated political agenda.Dominated by the Communist Party, ideological references present thechild as the ‘new man (sic) in progress’ and poor children replace theOlympics in photos. At this time, working class rights were at the top ofthe political and social agenda but without any specific focus on childlabour in Portuguese industries and rural work. In a country where thewelfare state was almost inexistent, the most common topic concernedinitiatives on caring (34.1 per cent), promoted by neighbours’ commis-sions oriented to children and old people, usually reported in thenewspaper following the established political framework: The biggestbuilding in Montargil was taken by the population to be made into a crechefor children and a home for elderly people.13 The newspaper also continuedits campaigns asking for financial support for seriously ill children whoneeded medical care outside the country. Accidents involving children(13.9 per cent) are the second most frequently covered topic, whileEducation was in third place (6.7 per cent), now starting to sustain acontinuous presence in the main topics reported on.

8. DN, November 28, 1970.

9. DN, March 5, 1970.

10. An expression used by French social scientist, Edgar Morin, to describe children of

the famous.

11. DN, September 25, 1970.

12. Parts of DN headlines, at February 24 and 25, 1970.

13. DN, March 25, 1975.

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Closed in November due to its editorial dependence from the

Communist Party, DN reopened a month later. Although state owned

since 1974, the first editorial of this new era claimed to be open to a

plurality of opinions and independent from the political power.In 1980, 1985 and 1990, DN was part of the state owned social

communication mechanism. Education, health and welfare policies, the

main subjects in the news items on children, were presented in different

ways: either in news texts quoting official sources and their declaration of

intentions, or in dramatic reports of events such as epidemics that killed

children living in slums.Situations and issues, such as high child mortality rates, child labour

and trafficking or the absence of a nursery school system sometimes

appeared in editorials in a critical assertive tone that questioned those in

power. A senior female journalist on the DN Editorial Board, Helena

Marques, contributed to a higher presence of these child-related issues in

editorials during these years. She recalls, for instance, how an impressive

but not sensationalist one page report on local community silence on a

neglected child living in a hen house was negatively received by her male

colleagues who considered the story as inappropriate to a newspaper like

DN; ‘Yes, it was a shocking situation but it had to be denounced. And

the girl was taken out of that hole’.This respectability contrasts, however, with a short-items section called

MiraMundo. This section reported on unusual events in a humorous way,

many of them involving children: South African girl gave birth at 9, but therecord age still belongs to a Mexican 6 year old girl.14 Items from exotic and

distant countries dominate these ‘eternal stories’ involving children,

representing 25 per cent of all news concerning children in 1980.However, the transition from a pre-modern to a modern society was

visible in the DN Supplements. There, longer articles were directly

oriented towards women, providing them with advice on childcare and

education, as well as information about the advanced European Family

policies, such as the conciliation of parental timetables with children at

home.The DN newsroom also changed its gender composition in the late

1980s with the arrival of more female and younger journalists with a

higher academic background. In interviews, these journalists talked about

how they had to overcome established routines in the coverage of social

minorities (children, women, and elderly people) and how they proposed

different type of coverage, involving, for instance, working on longer

dossiers for the week-end Supplements.

14. DN, July 10, 1980.

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In 1995 and 2000, the DN was part of the largest private national mediagroup and this brought about new editorial decisions: smaller texts, largerphotos, fewer social issues and more life-style news items in theSupplements section, with a greater focus on the reader as a consumer.While its Sunday magazine tended to move towards sensitive content,directed at the We-dom, i.e., the readers and their private interests, namelyas parents, the daily news agenda showed the emergence and consolidationof juvenile delinquency as a relevant topic. In contrast with the pastcoverage that used photographs showing children in public spaces,children were increasingly presented indoors, following a trend that hadbeen identified in the 1980s in the British press (Holland 1992). A femaleeditor associates the growing presence of news items on children withthe idea that ‘child behaviour makes a good story’, particularly for thosereaders who are parents. Another female journalist who writes severalitems on children and social risk stresses importance of the style ofreporting: ‘One should try to keep a distance but also maintain enoughproximity to show that the situation is not something from the world ofthe others’.

The 2000 editions of DN were compared with those of anotherPortuguese quality newspaper, Publico. The content of the 660 items inDN and the 561 items in Publico show similar agendas. Except for Education(which represented 16 per cent in Publico and 11.5 per cent in the DN),quantitative differences in other content categories are almost non-existent.As, in many cases, the reported events are not the same, this may be read as ashared professional culture of news-values on child-related issues.

A common theme identified was the gender bias of by-lines. In aninterview, a male journalist describes the gendered newsroom practice:‘It’s curious . . . if the subject is child labour or delinquency, if it is hardnews, we send a male journalist. If it concerns paternity, socialdysfunctions in the family, if it is soft, we send a female journalist. It isnot premeditated, really, but in the end that is what occurs. It is difficult toget away from . . .’

Issues associated with national economy (poverty, domestic child labour)are again almost absent in both newspapers. The leading categories in bothpapers were Education, followed by the Disputed child. The case of ElianGonzalez (a legal battle over parental custody involving Cuban and USpoliticians and Justice Systems) strongly contributed to the high positionof this category in both newspapers,15 showing how an unresolved storyinvolving a child receives so much attention in the news.

15. Out of the 661 child-related news items in the DN, 53 reported on the Elian case (8

per cent); in Publico 48 items were found on this case (8.5 per cent), out of the total of

561 items.

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The total of 557 international items, representing 47 per cent of thecorpus in both papers illustrates the contrast across different geographicareas. More than two-thirds of the international news covered deals withEurope and the US, while only one fifth deals with Africa, the MiddleEast/Asia and Latin America. Few news items (around 7 per cent) coverinternational conferences, UN resolutions and the like.

Five countries (UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and France) provided morethan three quarters of all European news collected; the UK clearly themost frequently reported on, with 96 items, followed by Italy (21),Germany (19), Spain (13), and France (13). Just 13 items come fromEuropean institutions.

European news items featured the topics of: (1) Sexual abuse; (2)Accidents and the risk of dangerous toys and food; (3) Education; (4) TheChild of science; and (5) the Olympic child,16 while news concerning Africa,Asia and Latin America features the following main topics: (1) Children asvictims of war, persecutions or natural disasters; (2) Health and medicalcarelessness; (3) Child soldiers; (4) Child poverty; and (5) Abandoned children.Whereas the first two European topics focused on events, or situations,commonly perceived as dangerous to our children (from the reader’s view),all five main topics about Africa, Asia or Latin America were characterizedby distance and negativity. Children from these continents were mainlyvictims of what was regarded as ‘remote problems’ from a Europeanperspective, often covered in short items, with no contextual information.Again, the absence of economic issues and poverty in the coverage ofchildren in European countries contrasts with a strong focus on theseissues outside Europe. This contrast is also visible in the photographicimagery used: the European child, mainly photographed alone in close up,is usually a white middle-class child, while children from Asia and Africaare portrayed in groups, as poor people or refugees.

4. Children in five European newspapers in 2000

A cross-national comparative analysis using the quantitative results fromthe first week of October 2000, showed a relative balance in the coverage ofthe five newspapers. The 97 child-related items from different Europeannewspapers were fairly evenly distributed: Publico, 17 items; Le Monde andThe Guardian, both with 18; the DN, 19 items; El Pais, 25 items. Thehigher value found in El Pais was due to public debates that week in Spainon Justice involving children: including, minimum age penal convictions

16. In 2000, this is the case of news on the birth of Leo Blair, the son of the British

Prime-Minister.

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for those involved with ETA, the separatist Basque organization, andadoption rules by homosexual couples.

Education was clearly the main topic in all newspapers as it accountedfor about a quarter of all news items published. Educational news mostlydealt with domestic issues, covering curricula, organizational problems,school violence, and students from social minorities. The Educationpages in The Guardian, El Pais and Publico contributed to a greatercontextualization and to different news styles (news reports, news analysis,interviews), whereas their absence in the others tended to stimulate morenews items based on official sources and reports. While curriculumcontent and evaluation are present in all the newspapers, coverage of theintegration and school experiences of students from social minorities arealmost absent during the week chosen for analysis. El Pais is the onlynewspaper that published news items in all categories.

The birth of Adam Nash, an American test-tube baby with cells makinghim suitable to act as a donor for his seriously ill older sister, was the onlycommon story. With the exception of Le Monde, all headlines followed thatof the Washington Post, the source of the story, Test tube baby born to save illsister.17 This way, all of them stressed the symbolic dimension of themedical act and the child of the science, preferring the verb to save ratherthan to cure. Sexual abuse on children is present in all the newspapersexcept The Guardian, confirming that this content is now more commonin Southern Europe. Another theme shared by the four newspapers ischildren as victims of war, the most relevant figure in the hierarchy of theinnocence (Moeller 2002).

It was found that the 97 headlines from different languages presentedquite an identical social position of children. Exclusion of children from theheadlines was frequent. When children were present in headlines, they weremostly passive targets, directly or indirectly affected by external actions.

The presentation of children as social actors, i.e., people with thepotential and the ability to carry out action, was quite rare in the headlines.This tended to occur in coverage of negative actions, such as juveniledelinquency or stressing pupils’ cultural ignorance (Primary school childrenknow little about Republican symbols/ October 5th is ‘Holy Friday’18). On theother hand, there were headlines underlining empowerment and meta-phorical processes associated with newborn babies or even foetalcapacities, in a modern discourse of progressive mastery over nature, socommon in the science pages: Embryology/Embryos can memorise and learn

17. Washington Post, October 2, 2000.

18. Publico, October 2, 2000. October 5th 1910 is the Day of the Implementation of

Portuguese Republican system.

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in mother’s uterus.19 The delinquent child and discussions of punishmentand the schooled child and the concept of ignorance appear side by side withthe child of science and all its amazing possibilities.

5. Conclusions and continuities

Based on historical, sociological and cultural approaches focusing onchildren in contemporary societies, this article identified trends inmainstream news media’s coverage of child-related issues.

Empirical research confirms that stories on children provide differentkinds of discourse, including pre-modern narratives, ‘eternal stories’ onfate and fatality.

Advice stories, which deal with private experiences with which theparent-reader can easily identify, go side by side with stories that focus onconflicts, polemics and accidents, stressing today’s child at risk andpresenting young people as wrongdoers.

Education is a controversial area in contemporary societies, involv-ing political, economic, social and cultural approaches resulting inthe development of a variety of news discourses. Mainly placed in the‘legitimate controversy sphere’, educational topics present considerablenewsworthiness. Mainly framed by the national agenda, education dealswith the idea of children as the country’s future. Questions aboutaccessing/abandoning schools, public/private systems, curriculum con-tent, rankings, integration vs. discrimination, basic and secondary skillsand so on are frequently covered topics, due to the controversy theystimulate. Education also prompts news full of advice aimed at the parent-reader, as well as a focus on the individual. However, children as studentsare rarely listened to and tend to be pictured as more ignorant than theirparents were. References to their new achievements, namely in their use ofon-line technologies and the ways they deal with information are almostabsent. Stories on economic issues involving children at national level areless visible: child poverty is mostly a ‘foreign’ problem.

Another issue that attracts media attention is violence perpetrated bythe younger members of society. Journalistic routines tend to frame eventsin an episodic way, ignoring contexts, ongoing project developments andpublic policies. It is only in dramatic moments, when violence erupts �/ aswas the case of Columbine and more recently the riots in French suburbs�/ that the media choose alternative frames that can lead to acknowledgingthe root causes of such phenomena.

19. El Pais, October 3, 2000.

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Critical perspectives on news routines and output may contribute to a

more demanding and critical sense by news professionals as well as by thepublic as citizens, encouraging debates on children’s rights as part of

human rights and public policies in contemporary societies, as well as theinteractive ways the news media work and circulate, as the ANDI work

shows.A more recent research project, Children and Youth in the News,20

explores the same Portuguese newspapers’ output in 2005, plus two otherswith a more popular profile and a sample of TV news, in order to comparetheir agendas. In spite of increasing the age limit according to the UN

Convention (under the age of 18), the comparison by age with the previousanalysis is assured. It also involves children with different ages and life

experiences (including wrongdoers) themselves, allowing them to expresstheir visions and ideas about the ways they are represented in news mediaaddressed to adults. Involving a multidisciplinary research team, this

research involves journalists as well as experts from different areasconcerning children in society in the discussion of the results, namely on

the coverage of sensitive subjects such as Justice, Education and mediaethics. These are the aims of the final Seminar, which will take place in

November 2007.The adoption of a transnational perspective, through the comparison of

news media representation of children in different European countries,makes it possible to identify both common and diverse trends, whichwould then allow for a broader understanding as well as a greater attention

to be paid to the ways children are presented in European news media.This, in turn, could also bring deeper insight into what the European news

agenda is and its possible influence on the ways the present and future ofEurope are commonly perceived through its youngest citizens.

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Cristina Ponte lectures in Journalism and Media Studies at FCSH,

Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Besides researching news media coverageof children’s issues, she is currently participating in the European Project

EU Kids Online, led by Sonia Levingstone (www.eukidsonline.net).

Address for correspondence: Cristina Ponte, Departamento de Ciencias da

Comunicacao, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Rua Fernando Namora, 36, 7.

dt, 1600-453 Lisbon, Portugal.

E-mail: cristina.ponte@fcsh.unl.pt

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