Why Do News Villains Cause Panic?

In an era of global technology, instant news, infomercials, electronic town meetings, and “Made for TV Documentaries,” the borderlines between news and analysis, news and entertainment, news and fiction are constantly shifting.

What’s a good book if it is not terrifying? Throughout the decades there have been different types of authors that have created terrifying books such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But how do the authors terrify and surprise a reader? The author surprises and terrifies the reader by using foreshadowing, setting, and cliffhanger. This can be seen in the short story, “August Heat” by W.F. Harvey. The author uses these types of task to surprise and terrify the reader.

Imagine the terror of a mass hysteria hoax. During the sixteenth century, witch trials caused the deaths of thousands as chaos spread throughout Europe. Many European villages in history have witnessed witch executions and the imprisonment of suspected witches. The Crucible, along with the Salem Witch Trials and the European witch trials, have many similarities and differences that make them both memorable and important.

The underrepresentation of white-collar crime in the news media is caused by lack of newsworthiness elements required by journalists to sell their stories. In 1977, Chibnall study of newsworthiness has highlighted the eight professional codes that govern the construction of news stories, these include of immediacy, dramatisation, personalisation, simplification, titillation, conventionalism, structured access and novelty (Chibnall 1977, 23; Kidd-Hewitt 1995,15). A challenge in the representation of white-collar crime is the newsworthy element of dramatisation. For instance, the news media’s inability to properly create ‘folk devils’ representation of white-collar criminals is due

I almost spit take my water. “Yo-you worked from the rooftops during bombings?!” I exclaimed. “That’s a risky move.”

This is a typical propaganda article which relies heavily on the emotions of the viewer to convey its message. It first projects scenes of typical

But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on”(204).

The War of the Worlds podcast discusses an event that happened in New Jersey, 1938. A radio station was broadcasting a drama series called The Mercury Theater on the Air where the episode relates a story which is supposed to be unreal. However, it caused controversy in the audience due to many factors, such as the time in which it was transmitted, the interruptions during the broadcast, the recreation of the scenario, and the voice with which the podcast was transmitted. Those aspects created confusion in the audience. As a result, the audience believed what they listened were truth facts. The episode was about the narration of an invasion of Martians that took place in a small and calm village of New Jersey. As a matter of fact, people considered

One way that the authors do this is right before the attacks were about to happen. They say, “Conflict seemed inevitable, but officials in Washington missed the signals that war was imminent.” By saying “imminent,” they are sending the message that war is going to happen; they just did not know when. Another time the authors use a frightening word choice is when the editors talk about when the soldier spotted a full Japanese fleet coming to Hawaii. The authors say, “This was the first Japanese carrier strike force of torpedo- and dive-bombers, escorted by Zero fighters.” This quote brings up a scary feeling of “What’s going to happen? Finally, the writers talk about what has been happening since Pearl Harbor. They say,“In 2001, terrorists intensified a slow-burning war against American civilians that had started years earlier and continues today.” This makes the audience feel uneasy about the world because anything can happen to anyone. All in all this tone is all persuasive because the audience can feel what is said through word choice.

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,

As we know, the pretext of the play is the aftermath of a war, so I

Moral panics have been a topic of interest by those who are concerned with criminal and deviant behavior for many years. The term first appeared in criminology in a book written by Stan Cohen, in 1972 and involved a general misinterpretation of the situation, with an exaggerated reaction to a perceived threat, when the actual threat that is being offered (Cohen, S., 1972) (Walters, R., & Bradley, T., 2005). This essay will attempt to explore this concept in further detail, with regards to the literatures findings and explanations of the motives, processes and finer details of a moral panic. It will then explain the media’s role in perpetuating the cycle that is involved with a moral panic. This will include the justification that is used by those in media roles, and the “melodrama” (Anker 2005) (Wright, S., 2015) that is often used in the reports of the issues that give rise to the panics. Lastly, the outcomes of the media’s influential role in the process will be examined through the literature, and also through examples of moral panics in recent settings. This will hopefully provide an overall understanding of the development, perpetuation, and lasting effects that are involved in a moral panic.

When it comes to finding about the news of what’s going on in our world, we want details and facts. We want the juice of what’s actually going on. The debate between the efficiency of newspapers and TV news, TV news is a lot more effective.

What was astonishing was not the rapidity of the news- that is, after all, the beauty of modern broadcasting technology- but the effect that the news had on the public. In the following weeks and months, story after story demonstrated the

In addition CNN ran a story on Vietnam that was proven inaccurate. The radio waves and television sets are flooded with sensationalized shows featuring beautiful young women and handsome men. The news watched today is sensationalized with one catastrophe after another. Is excitement what the market wants, or is the excitement expected because of a precedent set by the corporate owned media? Even in the reporting of sports, sensationalism rules. Channels like ESPN, owned by Disney , report homeruns, slam-dunks, and touchdowns with a dramatic twist. What effect does sensationalism have on the media¡¦s market? A survey done by the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports that ¡§spelling errors, bias, and sensationalism are corroding the credibility of newspapers.¡¨ The survey shows: