Introduction

Contemporary forms of media are diverse. Internet-based news and information sites, weblogs and podcasts, as well as traditional television programmes, newspapers and magazines, cater for fragmented and varied audiences and have the potential to reach large numbers of people. In this kind of environment, it might be expected that multifaceted and alternative stories of teenage pregnancy and motherhood would emerge. Yet the expansion of media outlets has led not to a greater diversification of stories about teenage pregnancy, but to a multiplication of negative stories about it and how the ‘problem’ urgently needs to be addressed. In one analysis of BBC Online content, nearly 60% of 162 news items had a focus on the prevention of teenage pregnancy (Shaw and Lawlor, 2007).

While the focus of stories on teenage pregnancy is largely on its negative aspects, the tone of reporting is invariably sensational, sometimes even salacious (Selman, 1998/2001; Simey and Wellings, 2008) – although many issues are dealt with similarly in the British media, and teenage pregnancy is not unique in this respect. The job of newspaper proprietors is to sell newspapers, and teenage sexuality, in its many forms, helps to do this. However, given that most people's perceptions of pregnant and parenting teenagers derive entirely from media sources (and rarely from experience), one consequence of contemporary modes of reporting on teenage pregnancy is a distorted public understanding of its scale. The gap between the actual size of the teenage parent population and commonly held beliefs about its size must be one of the greatest observed. In one study of public attitudes to lone parents, over one-fifth of respondents believed that 40% of lone parents are teenagers. The real figure is 3% (RBS, 2003).

This ‘myth–reality’ gap arises in part because journalists covering teenage pregnancy and, through them, their readers, often fail to understand the implications of the figures they are presented with and will readily accept their validity without proper consideration. An inability on the part of people who are not statisticians to gauge the size of the pregnant or parenting adolescent population is understandable. However, a failure to appreciate the scale of teenage pregnancy is not the only effect of salacious media coverage on our understanding of teenage pregnancy.