This will be based around the ways in which the media reported on events on the South coast of England in 1964.
We will read through and watch the text(s) below and then answer the question that follows in bold print....
The 1960s saw the birth of the teenager and life was never the same again. It was the start of a social and sexual revolution in Britain.
This revolution was partly a reaction to the austerity of the post war years, increased prosperity and spending power, and advances in technology and science.
Young people woke up to the idea that that they could have an identity and lifestyle different from their parents.
Teenagers started to break free from the traditions and rules of previous generations in fashion, lifestyle and sexual behaviour. They wanted their own music, clothes and freedom to do their own thing.
The Teenage Boom
In the early 19th century teenagers were treated as 'big children' or 'little adults' but this was to change from the 1950s and 60s.
The 1960s saw young people liberated from Victorian and post-war taboos, limitations and inhibitions.
It was the age of the contraceptive pill, drug culture and the permissive society.
Music provided the soundtrack for a generation with groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks topping the charts.
Fashion Revolution
The fashion revolution had its roots in the 1950s when Mary Quant opened her first shop, Bazaar, on Kings Road Chelsea in 1955.
But it was the Sixties that were to be the fashion decade with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton hitting the headlines.
London's Carnaby Street was the height of fashion whilst boutiques sprung up across the country selling affordable versions of the latest fashion gear.
Even the boys weren't left out with the new mods and rockers snapping up fashions to create their own tribes.
Hemlines went up and down with the mini, the midi and maxi skirt enjoying success with trendy shoppers. Then there were hot pants which caused a fashion sensation in the late 60s and early 70s.
Mods vs Rockers : 1964
One weekend in 1964 residents and holiday-makers in the seaside towns of Brighton, Bournemouth and Margate, were rocked by a sudden influx of young, cool gangs. They were Mods and Rockers, and the culture clash that occurred that weekend, described in the articles below in The Daily Sketch, Daily Mirror and others, has become iconic in the history of youth culture.
Mods and Rockers were easily identifiable by their distinctive clothing styles: the Mods wore Fred Perry and Ben Sherman clothing covered by a Parka jacket; while the Rockers wore leather biker jackets and jeans. Mods also rode European scooters like Lambrettas and Vespas and listened to a mix of Motown and Ska.
The Rockers favoured motorbikes and listened to American rock and roll such as Eddie Cochrane and Elvis.
The violent clashes between the two gangs were seized on by the media and used by moralists to exemplify the outrageous liberties enjoyed by British youth.
Here is an interesting section from the full article:
"On the Whitsun weekend of the 16-18 May 1964, the youth of Britain went mad. If you believed the newspapers, that is, who went with screaming headlines like ‘Battle of Brighton’, and ‘Wild Ones 'Beat Up' Margate’ . Editorials fulminated with predictions of national collapse, referring to the youths as 'those vermin' and 'mutated locusts wreaking untold havoc on the land'.
Whitsun 1964 has become famous as the peak of the Mods and Rockers riots, as large groups of teenagers committed mayhem on the rain-swept streets of southern resorts like Margate, Brighton, Clacton and Bournemouth. Extensively photographed and publicised at the time, these disturbances have entered pop folklore: proudly emblazoned on sites about Mod culture and expensively recreated in the 1979 film Quadrophenia.
Yet, as ever when you're dealing with tabloid newspapers, things are not quite what they seemed. What was trumpeted as a vicious exercise in national degeneration was to some extent, pre-hyped by the press. It was also not as all-encompassing as the headlines suggested: although an estimated 1,000 youths were involved in the Brighton disturbances, there were only 76 arrests. In Margate, there were an estimated 400 youths involved, with 64 arrests. While unpleasant and oppressive, this was hardly a teen take-over."
The Media's Response
The main conduit for 'news' in the early 1960s was newspapers - these had a much higher circulation than today and were, effectively, the dominant media of the time.
Why do you think this was the case?
Let's take a look at some of the newspaper reports relating to these events.
The video below shows how the media in the 1960s reported the clashes between mods and rockers and considers whether or not the media coverage exaggerated the scale of events leading to a 'moral panic' in relation to the behaviour of these youth subcultures.
This is evidence of historical creation of collective identity for British youth cultures.
Question
In what ways do the media texts referenced above create a representation of young people as being a danger to society?
The ways that media texts create a representation of the young people as a danger to society is by using military language in the papers to accentuate the level of peril and jeopardy these kids put on the population of England in that generation.
Quotes such as "Beach crowds take cover from battling Mods and Rockers" and "invade seaside", for these words to be used about the youth only 20 years after the first World War, it left several people in panic as they perceived the teenagers as a very big threat. Based on how the papers talk about the youth, it shows that the teenagers were a big threat to everyone and created a lot of negative perceptions of people that were in this particular age group.
Another way that the media represents as the young people being a danger to society is by the use of repetition to further convey how troublesome these people were.
The phrase "Wild Ones" is used heavily in almost every paper repeatedly to assist the view that people had on the youth. The adjective "wild" is a powerful term in this time as it means to be untamed, reckless, a thread and cultivated, so for the people to read that all these young people are wild is very threatening. The phrase "Wild Ones" is also a reference to the movie which was seen as very dangerous teenagers to everyone that watched it, and for them to frequently refer to the young generation as the "Wild Ones" further puts fear on the population.
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