Local news networks present a negative view of young people and crime, according to a report produced by a national children's advocacy organization.

The report, "Youth Framed by the Media," found that almost half of all local news crime stories featured people less than 18 years old. It also found that although kids make up 24 percent of the population, they only get 10 percent of the news time.

"The media depicts the current generation of young people as trouble and troubled," said Frank Gilliam, lead researcher on the report, "when, in fact, the evidence suggests that today's generation of kids are the most educated, the healthiest, the most civically engaged generation of Americans ever."

From the report, put out by the California-based Children Now, it seemed that the media uses youth as scapegoats for different issues. The director of the Children in the Media project at Children Now, Patty Miller, said that the media doesn't try hard enough to present the truth.

"There's been a historic downturn in crime committed both by and against children and this has the tendency to squeeze out other stories presenting an incomplete report on family life," Miller said.

Public interest groups may be feeding this portrayal as well.

"The media in the United States picks on groups that can't fight back," said Mike A. Males, a sociology instructor at University of California in Santa Cruz. "But it's also because a lot of major interest groups all across the spectrum have made negative portrayals of youth a part of their agendas so they can achieve various goals such as more programming, or more prisons or more security measures, legalizing drugs for grownups and that sort of thing." Males is the author of three books on children's issues, the most recent one is "Kids & Guns: How Politicians, Experts, and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth."

Miller said that while 40 percent of kids watch news every day, the news networks only think about their adult audiences. "The messages that are inherent in the news media definitely have an impact on kids because they are consuming so much news," she said.

A lot of kids aren't even aware of this negative portrayal and these shadows that the media hangs over them.

Obviously kids have a lot of say. But kids aren't old enough to vote. Kids aren't old enough to do a lot of things, and so they're not allowed to voice their opinions in the media.

If news producers, media makers and special interest groups did a better job of portraying kids, people might give children more of a voice in the world.

"We know that 86 percent of Americans get their news primarily from local broadcast news," said Miller. "So when they don't have a complete picture of what's going on in kids' lives that definitely has an impact. Policy makers watch television news and also get an incomplete picture about what's going on in kids' lives."

The negative news may also have an impact on young people's relationship to each other.

"It kind of divides young people into several categories," said Males, who is also a lead researcher with the Justice Policy Institute. "One category identifies with grownups and so they will give negative statements about their peers to the press and to forums and say, 'All of my peers are on drugs and they are irresponsible and violent and carry guns.'

"There's another segment of young people I think that resent this image and are angry about it but don't really know how to fight it."

Of course, not every thing children do is newsworthy and a lot of the stuff that they do that is bad would be more newsworthy. So if a kid shot 10 kids and is facing trial, that would probably take priority to a kid who is planting trees in his urban neighborhood.

Gilliam's advice on how kids can respond to the media isn't very encouraging. He said it takes time, money and power to get the media's attention - those are things kids don't have.

"The big advantage to being an adult is you're treated as an individual, you're no longer treated as a member of a terrible group and guilt by association, said Males. "Unlike other groups in this country, youth is a temporary status."