The Media 's Role As A Moral Panic Essay

It is no secret that the media is able to influence the general public’s opinion on most anything. Whether the subject is fiction or non, movies, documentaries, and the news especially, are capable of swaying the public’s opinions and perceptions one way or the other. Not even the world of law enforcement is safe from the media’s purview (Barlow, M. H. and Barlow, D. E. and Chiricos T. G., 1995), as media portrayals often romanticize law enforcement as a well oiled machine that always gets the bad guy, and has a perfect relationship with the public. On top of this, the media has displayed a poor habit of portraying crime as predominantly violent and racial, rather than showing the whole picture(Gilliam, F. D. and Iyengar, S. and Simon, A. and Wright, O., 1996). In this paper, the motives driving these depictions, as well as the scope and effect of the media’s influence on public perception of law enforcement, will be explored and discussed.

In human societies there will always be issues or problems that occur which cause some form of reaction from those who feel that their values or societal equilibrium is being threatened. Stanley Cohen and Jock Young led the way in explaining the notion of moral panics and how they are formed and their consequences on society. There have been numerous of these moral phenomena over the years, which have gripped society in a vice lock of terror and more often than not, ignorance. This essay will discuss the concept of the moral panic and look at the case of HIV/AIDS which caused a huge conflict of morality within society. This essay will also analyse the failings of health organisations, politicians, and the

This can help the wider community understand their own moral obligations and behaviour within society. As noted by ‘….Smolej (2010), portrayals of crime and deviance in the media are often seen as essential parts of social control since the media has a central role in defining what is deviant and condemnable.’

Viewers across the nation are affected by the social media causing stress on the subject by bombarding the public with media stories, rumors and “a sense of mass panic”. Victims have to relive that horrible moment because the media wants to

A moral panic is the public’s response to problems that seem threatening to the society. Moral panics are used by the media, however people are likely to panic out of proportion due the way it is upheld.

Most people use second hand information as their core source of information about crime, this source of information usually being the media. When carrying out sample research in Birmingham, Susan Smith (1984) discovered that 52% of people obtained most of their information about crime from the media, 36% obtained it from hearsay or alleged experiences of friends and neighbours, 3% from their own experiences, and 1% from the police service themselves (cited in Jones, 2001; 8). However the media tend to exaggerate upon areas of criminal activity causing a moral panic. ‘A moral panic is a semi- spontaneous or media generated mass movement based on the perception that some individual or group,

Challenge: Select and describe a “moral panic” against a perceived deviance. Analyse the role of the “moral entrepreneur” and “folk devil” in your selected case. Finally, explicate what it demonstrates about individuals and their socialization. (Length: 2 000 words)

Oftenly people within a culture create its own organizing principles and definitions when certain things occur that affect a community and/or society simultaneously, one of them being moral panics. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda introduces us to the concept of moral panics and what they consists of in their article “Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction”. According to the author 's, moral panic is an exaggerated response or concern by the public to an issue that is seen as threatening the moral standards of society, however the harm exposed may be minimal to none, usually ignited by the media, higher officials, action groups and so forth . Moral panic has become a well-known word often used to categorize social problems that we are exposed to today. Here, we see some examples of the three theories: the grassroots model, the elite-engineered model, and the interest-group theory, and how they are present in our lives today.

Moral panics are defined as “a mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behaviour or group of people is dangerously deviant” in the oxford dictionary of law. (Gooch & Williams, 2007). This proposes that moral panics are not necessarily something to panic about but are just over dramatized reactions towards deviance. A group or culture triggers a moral panic by acting against the norms, challenging the society they live in, behaving against traditions and bearing no common decency. The “exaggerated social reaction” (Marsh & Melville, 2011, p. 1) causes the panic within society itself and the media. Although, moral panics usually pass over like “waves”, (2005, p. 27) as Kenneth Thompson describes. Furthermore, Charles Krinsky’s definition is “an episode, often triggered by alarming media stories,… of exaggerated or misdirected public concern, anxiety, fear, or anger over a perceived threat to social order.” (2013, p. 1) Suggesting that moral panics are heavily influenced by the media and as a result of this any identities created are also influenced by the media. Therefore, identities given to the deviant ones may be false or exaggerated alongside the moral panic itself.

A moral panic is a phenomenon that is examined and understood in an unbiased fashion. This type of panic locates a “folk devil,” is shared, remains out of synch with the seriousness it evokes, and varies in intensity over time (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 41). On the other hand, a media panic is a moral panic about the effects of a communications medium of technology (Class lecture: January 27, 2016). Overall, a moral panic is based upon the reaction of society from an event while a media panic is the reaction of society from a type of technology. This paper looks to examine the similarities and differences between surveillance in the government today and surveillance in the government during the Cold War. It will address the effects these events have or had on society while examining specific media panics that played a role in society’s reactions to these historical events. By providing evidence to prove how these panics affect society, I will examine why these moral and media panics exist and the impact they have had on society as a whole.

Michael Tonry in his book “Thinking About Crime” brings up the subject of moral panics (pg 86). A moral panic as defined by Stuart Hall is as follows

Lastly, I will discuss how the article I have chosen greatly relates to this idea of media and moral panics. The sexualisation of women in the media is very much true, and is continuously reinforced and exposed to children. Women as sexual objects, and women continuously being a part of news that relate to sexual acts is a form of moral and media panic in society. Moral panics have become the main way in which daily events are brought to the attention of the public. “Moral panics become a means whereby the state persuades people to accept the need to deal with threats to the social order through authoritarian means” (Buckingham & Jensen, 416, 2012). To add, moral panics are overwhelmingly concerned with moral values, and drawing on lines between

The ability of democracies to make decisions in line with the long term interests of its citizens is vulnerable to intense, short term shift in public opinion. There are few shifts more radical than those experienced by societies in the throes of moral panic – those times where a perceived social threat creates high levels of concern and anxiety in the population. Though much has been written about moral panics, there has not yet been a general discussion about its implications for the theory and

The mass media's panic reporting is to make the people aware of the problem, then to include reliable outcomes for its effects, and finally to provide reliable expert information on how to deal with the problem and lessen negative expectations as was supposed to happen in the y2k reporting but unfortunately did not happen.

Discuss the notion of ‘moral panics’. Illustrate your discussions with examples of ‘folk devils,’ and incorporating concepts such as ‘the deviancy amplification spiral’ and the need for law and order.