Markus just graduated junior high. He’s becoming a young man, is an OK student, but just doesn’t try very hard.

The long-awaited summer begins to drift by, like all the others. Just another couple of months of screwing around until school starts again.

But this summer is different from all the others.

Oh sure, he’s spending time with his old friends in the neighborhood. And he still helps his mom take care of little Jordan and Iesha. They need some man to look up to.

At least that was Markus’ line-of-thinking at the start of the summer. Lately he’s been feeling like he really doesn’t fit in. He’s sick of playing kiddie games with his brother and sister, and the other kids in the neighborhood just aren’t cutting it.

All Markus can think about is that he’s going to be in high school next year.

He doesn’t want to be known as some mama’s boy or a nerd. He wants to be somebody.

Before he even knows it, they come for him. Actually, he won’t know what is about to happen to him — what impact the choices he’s about to make will affect his life — for a long time.

They first make him feel like he belongs. No matter what happens the gang’s there for you, Markus. He’s starting to learn that everyone has a motive.

Everyone’s out to get you and what’s yours. But the gang’s solid. They’re your family now.

Markus sees the guns glisten. He sees the power, the brotherhood. He sees the authority and feels that he belongs now.

It starts with the initiation — a bloody ritual of a beating by your brothers until you’re almost dead. It’s passed on with pride to others who want to join the elite.

The influence of your “brothers” makes Markus forget about his family, his old friends, his old life.

He’s respected in high school — what he wanted, but now he’ll pay the price for life.

There is no Markus. He’s made up. But there are many, many young people out there who have put themselves into the same position Markus was in. He/she will join a gang and/or commit crimes, sometimes violent ones.

Everyday people ask why has the crime rate risen? Why are 12-year-olds killing and savagely attacking other 12-year-olds? What is going wrong in society? Who’s to blame for all the wrongs?

Of course, the first to blame is the media. Why not? It’s the most wide-spread information source in the world. Television especially.

Violence in the media — on the front page of your local newspaper or on your TV screen — is the cause for the surge in violent crime in the past 10 years.

It’s been one of the options as a topic for a major research paper in many of my classes for a couple years now.

But I highly disagree with that idea. I also don’t think that the media doesn’t have any impact on society. That the news just tells the events of the day.

That would be a very naive thought.

So where do I sit? Does the media affect society to the point where it causes people to go out and commit murder? stab someone? or do a drive-by?

Let’s look at something first. The television, the radio and the newspaper have specific audiences targeted and gear their news towards that audience. Who watches the news at 10 p.m.? Your mom and dad? Hopefully you do. They give you a 20- second to sometimes a minute and a half brief on what the main facts of the event that happened.

Do you think the guys or gals in the gangs make a date to meet at Tony’s house to catch John and Kathy’s newscast on the latest happenings? I don’t.

The only reason I can see a gang member watching the news is to get his five minutes of glory with his friends before he gets arrested.

The papers then pick up where TV left off. The papers explore in more detail the different angles to the story.

They tell you the rest of the answers that the TV didn’t have time to tell you. And they tell you the name of the guy they arrested last night.

No, I think that television and society have a symbiotic relationship. They feed off one another.

The media is an important tool for society to give and receive information. Society won’t stop watching or reading no matter what.

In turn, the media’s purpose is to report goings-on with a neutral voice without making the audience fall asleep. Each affects the other.

In the case of “Markus,” he became the friends he chose. He made the gang his new environment. He is a product of his environment. The social group he chose became his best friend and his worst enemy at the same time.

When his gang went out and did a drive-by and it got reported on the news that night, it may have sparked someone else’s drive to belong — to be somebody.

The news might make them somebody for a night, but in the end they become another mug shot on a tape — no one special.

The media’s reporting of violence does not spark more violence. It reports and informs people that this kind of thing is out there. Be careful.

Society needs to reexamine its method of teaching values and keeping track of America’s children.

We don’t want our generation to be labeled anything and especially “X.”

Society can use the media to teach people how to stop the patterns that are causing so much violence to be reported on.

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April Samp is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Eldora.