"The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it."

I disagree with this statement as the media consistently portray youths in a negative light, particularly in news papers and online news sites which use biased words when describing an event or incident to make the audience see this group in a negative way.

Michael Foucault's theory on collective identity says that being part of a collective identity can be negative in some respects as this influences the creation of stereotypes. The media then takes these stereotypes and portrays all youths to be of the group which is behaving negatively. The media uses negative words to describe these events such as 'brazen', 'criminals', thugs and many more. It also generalises when describing these groups, using words such as 'youths', which creates a moral panic in society as they will then see all youths as dangerous or as a threat when really not all youths are how the media described this small group.

Stuart Halls encoding and decoding theory explains that the media encodes messages in their texts for us to decode into our own ideas and opinion, however by using biased words it sways the decision which the audience makes, creating a reality in their mind which doesn't really exist. An example of this is the London Riots. The media exaggerated the actions committed and created fear in society, blaming the entire event on youths. They did this through the use of pictures, video footage and biased words such as 'yobs', 'animals' and 'thugs' which categorises youths and controls the mind of the audience, telling people in society how to think instead of letting them decided for themselve.

This is a form of post modernisation, where the media controls the mind of the audience and constructs a reality for them in their mind which they will base their life around. If the media merely reflected on collective identity, they would not use biased words or construct any type of view in the audiences head but would instead just describe or explain an incident and allow the audience to make their own judgement. This point is backed up by Strinati's theory on post modernism. Stranati says; post modernism is said to describe the emergence of a social order in which the importance and power of the mass media and popular culture means that they govern and shape all other forms of social relationships.

In conclusion, I believe that the media constructs collective identity’s such as youth. Post modernism is used to control the way by which the audience thinks so that the view of which the media is constructing will be seen as the correct view and allow them to control the way people live their lives. The more the force of the media dominates society’s views, the more the Marxist theory becomes true; if we are all persaded to think the same way, we will all eventually have the same view about the collective identities of people, their behaviour, activities which they take part in and their interests.In the future, this will possibly lead to people realising the truth behind the media and that the media is constructing views rather than reflecting them which could possibly result in people not listening to what the media has to say or take notice of the points which they are trying to put across, resulting in the media losing its power in society.