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Media
Youth gangs: top grades for our newspapers
"For us, the gang is the family. I get my self confidence
from the gang.” This is what Million, leader of the Bad
Boys, says in an interview with reporter Christiane Desjardins
of La Presse on November 3, 1999. “Abandoned by
his father at the age of 11, Million joined a street gang
in New York, and then moved to Montréal, where he
became the leader of the Bad Boys, a group that began to
drift apart a few years ago. He restructured the gang,
whose hard core today is made up of ten or so members who
are loyal to the death,” the reporter writes.
This excerpt provides a good illustration of the way the
print media deal with the question of street gangs in Québec. “Québec
newspapers cover criminal activities by street gangs realistically.
The assaults and homicides obviously make up a large part
of the articles, but the articles also address the social
context, and seek to understand them,” explains Alexis
Dusonchet at the end of a study on the image of street
gangs in the Québec media.
For his master's thesis, the young many collected 306
articles on street gangs that appeared between 1995 and
2000 in La Presse , Le Journal de Montréal and Le
Devoir . After a scholarly analysis based on 143 variables,
he draws an overall positive picture of the treatment of
the phenomenon in Québec relative to the rest of
North America. “In the United States, we see a clear tendency
to overmediatize crimes against persons committed by young
people, especially murders. This has reached ridiculous
proportions. Nothing like this happens in Québec,” the
student explains.
The American media, especially the newspapers, have always
represented the phenomenon as constantly growing, and getting
more and more serious, at the point of triggering several
crises or moral panics,” we read in Mr. Dusonchet's thesis. “Montréal
newspapers, on the other hand, accord very little importance
to the various aspects of the growth of the phenomenon
(11.4% of articles in the study). Another comparison tends
to confirm this impression […]: the number of articles
on the theme of gangs in the Honolulu Star Bulletin grew
4000% between 1987 and 1996, and in US daily papers in
general by 3600% between 1983 and 1994. The frequency of
articles on gang-related issues in Montréal papers
has gone up and down. And whereas the US media have often
claimed that gangs were more and more numerous, dangerous,
violent and better armed […], Montréal region newspapers
have remained fairly quiet on the subject.”
Programs like 24 Hours , Dateline , Cops,
etc., which are designed to boost ratings on the
major US networks, convey a distorted image of street
gangs. “They depict young people as dangerous psychopaths,
killers and bloodthirsty criminals, whereas in fact murders
represent less than 1% of crimes in both Canada and the
US.”
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