Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems

by Joel Best (Editor)

Book by

257 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 1989

Reviews

[mohave · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is a general view about child abuse and neglect that pervades all of the mass media accounts. This view holds that child abuse and/or neglect is an entirely individualistic phenomenon, an act for which an individual is solely responsible. Rarely do stories refer to the wide range of stresses that can influence individuals, including such factors as absent partners, alcoholism, unemployment, financial difficulties, drug problems, stigma-tization from prior arrests and/or prison records, poor occupational or school preparation, and a wide range of social-psychological difficulties. Even when such factors are cited or alluded to in mass media reports, they are not seen as mitigating personal responsibility. Society and its institutions are not seen as causal agents in producing child abuse and neglect; rather, the press takes the view that society and its institutions represent functional responses to the problem tending to control it. This is, of course, in keeping with larger trends involving the individualization and medicalization of a wide range of social problems "

"Front line reporters at the local level tend to be young and, unlike seasoned news veterans, unreflective about adopting the official or bureaucratic view about some problem. It often takes years to learn about the deeper realities and meanings of some event or phenomenon, to recognize the hidden organizational interests that lie behind some rational, scientistic rhetoric. This is true in the child abuse field; many local news reporters are seduced by the bureaucratic reporting of a horrific story and rush to news judgment without realizing how the dissémination of these unrepresentative stories promotes vested bureaucratic, agency, or political interests. That two Denver Post reporters would win a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the myths and hidden promotive interests in the “missing children” issue is one small indication that the unexamined assumptions of the mass media are changing."