Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i.

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2009:9 The Depiction of Inequalities and Value Messages in Magazines for Children and Youth – The Case of Bravo Magazine

Ivo Bayer, Jitka Kolářová, Marta Kolářová, Martin Vávra

This study examines the content of magazines for young people, mainly from the perspective of their mediation of lifestyle, reproduction of inequalities, and suggested value orientations. The study focuses on an analysis of the two youth magazines with the largest readership, Bravo and ABC, and the former of the two is the centre of this analysis. The authors employ three analytical approaches: a quantitative analysis of the frequency of words combined with a qualitative interference analysis, a discourse analysis, and an ethnographic content analysis. The main findings are that Bravo in particular mediates lifestyle, especially in the form of commercial youth culture (primarily fashion and music) and places emphasis on entertainment and advice on how young people can make themselves more attractive. The key values portrayed, usually through stories about young celebrities, are success, hard work, and independence, along with an attractive physical appearance and traditional family values. Columns focusing on personal relationship advice to readers primarily promote the values of personal happiness, wellbeing, and development of the individual. The content is not however a mindless celebration of hedonism and egoism, as it is constrained by health and moral concerns for young people. But even here heavy emphasis is placed on physical appearance and attractiveness as the essential preconditions for a happy life.

Keywords

media, inequalities, values, youth, lifestyle, celebrity, class, gender, race, sexuality, socialisation

Summary

This study examines the content of magazines targeting young people from the perspective of how they mediate lifestyle, reproduce inequalities, and suggest value orientations. The study is focused on an analysis of two children’s magazines that have the largest readership in the Czech Republic, Bravo and ABC, and the former of the two is central for this analysis. The introductory chapter of the study describes the two magazines and their position in the Czech market (e.g. print run, distribution figures, readership).

The first analytical part of the study examines the portrayal of lifestyle in Bravo. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis is based on examining the vocabulary of individual texts, their frequency, and the co-occurrence of words in individual texts. The qualitative analysis attempts to describe and analyse the content of the articles in their context, i.e. to uncover connections between the text and latent messages. The authors studied a corpus of texts from issues of Bravo published between 6 October 2005 and the end of 2006, provided by NewtonIT.

Bravo conforms to the current trends in society of extending the age of adolescence of conceiving adolescence as an age of irresponsibility. This is not just about entering the labour force at a later age, but about the emphasis on retaining the youthful attributes of sportiness and physical beauty for as long as possible. Physical appearance, especially in the case of girls, is at the centre of the magazine’s lifestyle mediation. Bravo tries to convince female readers that being attractive is something they have to learn, while personal talents, personality, and similar attributes are secondary. This kind of emphasis in articles on lifestyle includes advice about how – with the help of cosmetics and clothing – young people can make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex. Here the magazine’s editorial component is discreetly fused with advertising. Also, there is a general ‘expectation’ that girls should be reliable and restrained – essentially gender traditional attributes.

Bravo typically tries to target majority trends of young people, while at the same time it successfully seeks out new trends and fashions that can become trendy for the majority. For young people the consumption of certain products (clothing) has a defining function for their specific lifestyle: it allows them to set themselves apart from the adult generation. The lifestyle of commercial youth culture centres on two main areas: fashion and music.

Youth individualisation is a situation in which young people can largely stage their lifestyle. Often just a change of clothing suffices. Bravo is the ideal partner for this. It offers ‘light’ lifestyle formulae for achieving happiness. It paints a picture of leisure time as a search for entertainment, diversion, and enjoyment.

Entertainment is foremost, but Bravo knows no other hobbies but pop music, fashion, and movies. The scope of news and themes almost never goes beyond the private sphere and the immediate surroundings of the individual; social contexts are not a theme, and most of what is written in the magazine’s pages could be taking place anywhere at any time. The world of Bravo is ahistorical, celebrity news has an illusory urgency, the world of ‘non-stars’ hangs in a vacuum and remains entirely private.

The second analytical part of the study shows how Bravo and ABC construct ‘value messages’ or how they portray the ‘value content of leisure time’. The authors concentrated on those columns in Bravo that could be called ‘educational’ – the two-page advice column ‘Love, Sex and Suffering’, the news column ‘Report’, the comic strip ‘Sally and Fanny’, and a photo series called ‘Photo Love-Story’. Alongside providing entertainment and information, these columns present readers with models of behaviour. In ABC the analysis focused on what options, guidelines, and standards readers are presented with for spending their free time.

From the analysis it is possible to say that in both magazines readers are addressed as rational and self-competent people, not as children who have to be told what not to do (unless it is something harmful to their health) or who need to be frightened off or called to obedience and so forth. The overarching value that informs what Bravo readers are told is the value of the personal happiness, wellbeing, and development of the individual, which is especially evident in the content of the column ‘Love, Sex and Suffering’. The content is not however a celebration of hedonism and egoism, as it is constrained by health and moral concerns for young people. However, here moral rules do not derive from tradition, parents, or the school, but emanate naturally from peer-group relationships (for example, the bond of loyalty). The main theme of the columns analysed are personal relationships with partners and peer friendships.

In the past twenty years the content of ABC has changed substantially, but it is still a magazine that provides information from the world of science and technology and leisure time tips, the content of these tips, however, is now different. The portrayal of leisure time in ABC has definitely been commercialised. There are fewer instructions on how readers can make some artifacts themselves, and instead there are more commercial profiles of consumer goods. There has been a significant shift in focus towards consumer technology (cell phones, computers), the promotion and reviews of such items, tips on how to use them (the case of ABC), and fashion accessories (Bravo). The magazines also focus more on individualisation – the texts in Bravo and ABC today appeal to individuals and not to organised groups of children and young people, which is what ABC did before 1989 and even shortly after that year.

The third analytical part of the study examines the representation of inequalities in Bravo. This analysis of media content focused on how class, race, gender, and sexual differences and differentiation are portrayed. Class, understood as inequality of property, power, prestige, and fame, was selected as the main point of interest, and by extension differences between the sexes, races, ethnic groups, and sexual orientation were also examined. In the magazines class is manifested in stories about ‘stars’ and their relationship to ‘ordinary’ people. The media’s depiction of social differentiation was examined using a qualitative analysis combining textual and visual analysis of that the media image. In total, the authors examined 26 issues of Bravo published in 2008, focusing on pages devoted to celebrities (that is, most of the pages in the magazine).

Bravo mostly focuses on very young celebrities. It also tries to create a kind of community of young readers. It tries to form a para-social relationship between the journal, readers, and celebrities and creates the illusion that in some way readers are actually able to communicate with the stars.

Bravo focuses on portraying celebrity lifestyles: their success, how they got there, and the advantage of luxury consumption that comes with success. In Bravo much is written about careers, work, business, and making money. The magazine uses celebrities to promote values that are communicated to readers as though articulated by stars themselves. The values that stand out most in this context are success, hard work, and independence, along with an attractive appearance and traditional family values. The love life and relationships of celebrities form the core content of Bravo and celebrities very often comment on relationships, partnerships, and marriage.

From a gender perspective, the content of the magazine is feminised and sexualised, more targeted at girls, but it tries to include special pages designed to attract boys, too. Gender roles and the values attached to them as they appear in the pages of Bravo are certainly not defined in an altogether stereotypical and conservative way. The magazine encourages girls to be active, but the traditional division of roles is still present. Masculinity and femininity are shaped in the magazine by a very important part of its content, which is devoted to using fashion, cosmetics and style to work on personal appearance – and here appearance is also important for boys.

With regard to race and ethnicity, Bravo steers away from open racism, but the roles of white stars are much more variegated than the roles of non-white celebrities. Black men are the most commonly portrayed non-white men in Bravo, and in most cases those portrayed are tough, aggressive, rich rappers. The portrayal of non-white women is mainly in the sense of ‘sexy exotic beauty’.

In the case of sexual differentiation, Bravo’s texts revolve around the dominant conception of sexuality – heterosexuality is the norm. Several cases were found in the magazine in which homosexuality figured as a theme, mostly they were stories about female celebrities (women kissing, but never men doing so) that were portrayed in Bravo as celebrity quirks. The authors found strong signs of stereotyped and normalized view of homosexuality in Bravo.