The 24 essays in this collection explore the ways in which young people are represented in the media in Australia. Australia's media are full of bad news about young people as perpetrators or victims of crime. The first six chapters explore a range of theoretical issues that connect media reports of young people with processes of governance in Australia. The next seven chapters examine media reports of particular events involving young people and consider media responses to those incidents. The eight chapters that follow identify some of the inclusionary/exclusionary strategies built into media accounts of particular groups of young people. The final three chapters deal with films about youth. The main theme that emerges from these disparate accounts is not that the media engage in selective interpretation, distortion, and exaggeration, but that particular forms of language and imagery combine to represent youth semiotically as a problem social category. Reports about problems among the young serve to reinforce preconceived ideas about this population and to add weight to increased calls for state intervention and social control. (Contains 6 figures, 4 tables, and 329 references.) (SLD)