What responsibility does the Media have for or understanding of groups in society?

In terms of collected identity, the Media has a huge responsibility upon representing these groups to the audience. Audience can perceive a certain group by how they are represented while an individual would be of a different type of person to their audience pool. This could create clashes of beliefs to the certain people who have been represented.
An example of a big issue in collective identity being represented in media is the London Riots, where mainly hooligan hooded youngsters are the prime suspects who are also only mainly interviewed by Media and published. Due to this, Media corrupted other people’s minds to start up in aggression to how their social group has been described negatively. The BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking providers have been hit the hardest due to the lack of publicity they’ve given to the Media for evidence of crimes in exchange for the personal details privacy of their users. Their responsibility in this is crucial due to the fact that they have to give out every person’s personal details, which can create a lack of trust to these companies from their customers.
“Identity is complicated – everybody thinks they’ve got one” – David Gauntlett. This quote shows that collateral representation can create social trespassing when conjuring images of a group of people who have a different identity, since everyone is unique, to the mass audience. Their responsibility in this is to carefully pick out the points, in terms of the character’s representations in mise-en-scene, camera, sound, etc., which can create less criticism towards the media.
Institutions such as the BBC are expected to represent every social group as they are being funded by TV licence. In terms of international group representation, this crosses legal terms in different areas of the world, which can criticise the company holding the media which represented this way. This event is made to happen less by the media gaining more information of not only the story, but the legal terms which apply in an area, also minding the audience they may be hitting, which can cause problems.
Once, Osama Bin Laden has been broadcasted sitting next to Bert, a Sesame Street Muppet. This raised criticism from the creators of Sesame Street. against the world-known terrorists. This collective identity can affect the Muppet negatively, while giving Bin Laden the initial representation of being powerful.
The Media's censorship is a must, but with growing technology, and the introduction of the World Wide Web, people worldwide can read leaked information, which the Media themselves can't stop.