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Moral panic

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New media and moral panics media in minutes episode 5


A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. A Dictionary of Sociology defines a moral panic as "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media". The media are key players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Stanley Cohen states that moral panic is "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". Examples of Moral Panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory hebephiles or paedophiles, belief in ritual abuse of women and children by satanic cults, the War on Drugs, and other Public Health Issues.

Contents

Mods rockers and moral panics


Use as a social science term

Marshall McLuhan gave the term academic treatment in his book Understanding Media, written in 1964. According to Stanley Cohen, author of a sociological study about youth culture and media called Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), a moral panic occurs when "...[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as moral entrepreneurs, while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as 'folk devils'.

British vs American

Many sociologists have pointed out the differences between definitions of a moral panic described by American and British sociologists. In addition to pointing out other sociologists who note the distinction, Kenneth Thompson has characterized the difference as American sociologists tending to emphasize psychological factors while the British portray moral panics as crises of capitalism.

British criminologist Jock Young used the term in his participant observation study of drug taking in Porthmadog between 1967 and 1969. In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the public reaction to the phenomenon of mugging and the perception that it had recently been imported from American culture into the UK. Employing Cohen's definition of moral panic, Hall et al. theorized that the "...rising crime rate equation..." performs an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes; moral panics could thereby be ignited to create public support for the need to "...police the crisis".

Cohen's Stages of Moral Panic

According to Stanley Cohen, often considered the researcher that first coined the term "moral panic", there are five key stages in the construction of a moral panic:

  1. Someone, something or a group are defined as a threat to social norms or community interests;
  2. The threat is then depicted in a simple and recognizable symbol/form by the media;
  3. The portrayal of this symbol rouses public concern;
  4. There is a response from authorities and policy makers;
  5. The moral panic over the issue results in social changes within the community.

In 1971 Stanley Cohen investigated a series of "moral panics". Cohen used the term "moral panic" to characterize the reactions of the media, the public, and agents of social control to youth disturbances. This work, involving the Mods and Rockers, demonstrated how agents of social control amplified deviance. According to Cohen, these groups were labeled as being outside the central core values of consensual society and as posing a threat to both the values of society and society itself, hence the term "folk devils".

Mass media

According to Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the concept of "moral panic" were linked to certain assumption about the mass media. Stanley Cohen illustrated that the mass media is the primary source of the public’s knowledge about deviance and social problems. In addition, Cohen claimed that moral panic ‘cause’ folk devil by labeling more actions and people.

The media appear in any or all three roles in moral panic dramas:

  • Setting the agenda – selecting deviant or socially problematic events deemed as newsworthy, then using finer filters to select which events are candidates for moral panic.
  • Transmitting the images – transmitting the claims, by the using the rhetoric of moral panics;
  • Breaking the silence and making the claim
  • Characteristics

    Moral panics have several distinct features (many of which are discredited in sociological literature). According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, moral panic consists of the following characteristics:

  • Concern – There must be the belief that the behaviour of the group or activity deemed deviant is likely to have a negative effect on society;
  • Hostility – Hostility toward the group in question increases, and they become "folk devils". A clear division forms between "them" and "us";
  • Consensus – Though concern does not have to be nationwide, there must be widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society. It is important at this stage that the "moral entrepreneurs" are vocal and the "folk devils" appear weak and disorganized;
  • Disproportionality – The action taken is disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the accused group;
  • Volatility – Moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared due to a wane in public interest or news reports changing to another narrative.
  • 20th-21st century: Public health

    The fear of disease and spread of panic dates back many centuries and continues into the 21st century with diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Zika, and SARS. Cohen's idea of the "folk devil" and epidemics can be compared because of their role in spreading mass panic and fear. The intense concentration on hygiene emerged, before the 20th century, with a medical belief referred to as miasma. The miasma theory states that disease was the direct result of the polluting emanations of filth: sewer gas, garbage fumes, and stenches that polluted air and water, which results in an epidemic. The Great Stink of 1858 was blamed on miasma, along with reoccurring cholera epidemics during the Victorian era. Although the water was safe to drink in most parts of London, such a panic had arisen that very few people would dare drink the water.

    1970s–present: Increase in crime

    Research shows that fears of increasing crime is often the cause of moral panics. Recent studies have shown that despite declining crime rates, this phenomenon, which often taps into a populations' "herd mentality," continues to occur in various cultures. Japanese jurist Koichi Hamai explains how the changes in crime recording in Japan since the 1990s caused people to believe that the crime rate is rising and that crimes were getting increasingly severe.

    1970s–present: Video games and violence

    There have been calls to regulate violence in video games for nearly as long as the video game industry has existed, with Death Race a notable early example. In the 1990s, however, improvements in video game technology allowed for more lifelike depictions of violence in games like Mortal Kombat and Doom. The industry attracted controversy over violent content and concerns about effects they might have on players, generating frequent media stories drawing connections between video games and violent behavior as well as a number of academic studies reporting conflicting findings about the strength of correlations. According to Christopher Ferguson, sensationalist media reports and the scientific community unintentionally worked together in "promoting an unreasonable fear of violent video games". Concerns from parts of the public about violent games led to cautionary, often exaggerated news stories, warnings from politicians and other public figures, and calls for research to prove the connection, which in turn led to studies "speaking beyond the available data and allowing the promulgation of extreme claims without the usual scientific caution and skepticism".

    Since the 1990s, there have been attempts to regulate violent video games in the United States through congressional bills as well as within the industry. Public concern and media coverage of violent video games reached a high point following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, after which videos were found of the perpetrators talking about violent games like Doom and making comparisons between the acts they intended to carry out and aspects of games.

    Ferguson and others have explained the video game moral panic as part of a cycle that all new media go through. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that legally restricting sales of video games to minors would be unconstitutional and called the research presented in favor of regulation "unpersuasive".

    1970s–present: War on drugs

    Some critics have pointed to moral panic as an explanation for the War on Drugs. For example, a Royal Society of Arts commission concluded that "the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, ... is driven more by 'moral panic' than by a practical desire to reduce harm."

    Some have written that one of the many rungs supporting the moral panic behind the war on drugs was a separate but related moral panic, which peaked in the late 90's, involving media's gross exaggeration of the frequency of the surreptitious use of date rape drugs. News media have been criticized for advocating "grossly excessive protective measures for women, particularly in coverage between 1996 and 1998", for overstating the threat and for excessively dwelling on the topic. For example, a 2009 Australian study found that of 97 instances of patients admitted to the hospital believing their drinks might have been spiked but drug panel tests were unable to detect any drug in any of the cases.

    1980s–1990s: Dungeons & Dragons

    At various times, Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games have been accused of promoting such practices as Satanism, witchcraft, suicide, pornography and murder. In the 1980s and later, some groups, especially fundamentalist Christian groups, accused the games of encouraging interest in sorcery and the veneration of demons. While many of these criticisms have been aimed specifically at Dungeons & Dragons, but touch on the genre of fantasy roleplaying games as a whole.

    1980s–1990s: Satanic ritual abuse

    A series of moral panics regarding Satanic ritual abuse originated in the US and spread to other English-speaking countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s and 2000s, there have been instances of moral panics in the UK and the US related to colloquial uses of the term pedophilia to refer to such unusual crimes as high-profile cases of child abduction.

    1980s-present: HIV/AIDS

    Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), may lead to or exacerbate other health conditions such as pneumonia, fungal infections, tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, and cytomegalovirus. A meeting of the British Sociological Association's South West and Wales Study entitled "AIDS: The Latest Moral Panic" was prompted by the growing interest of medical sociologists in AIDS, as well as that of UK health care professionals working in the field of health education. It took place at a time when both groups were beginning to voice an increased concern with the growing media attention and fear-mongering that AIDS was attracting. In the 1980s, a moral panic was created within the media over HIV/AIDS. The notable iceberg ad by the government clearly hinted that the public was uninformed about HIV/AIDS due to a lack of publicly assessable and accurate information. The media outlets nicknamed HIV/AIDS the "gay plague", causing further stigmatization and misunderstandings about the disease. However, scientists gained a far better understanding of HIV/AIDS as it grew in the 1980s and moved into the 1990s and beyond. The illness was still negatively viewed by many as either caused by, or passed on through, the gay community. Once it became clear that this wasn't the case, the moral panic created by the media changed to blaming the overall negligence of ethical standards of the younger generation (both male and female), resulting in another moral panic. It is prevalent in the media and the way HIV/AIDS is depicted taken from this extract, “British TV and press coverage is locked into an agenda which blocks out any approach to the subject which does not conform in advance to the values and language of a profoundly homophobic culture- a culture that is which does not regard gay men as fully or properly human. No distinction obtains for the agenda between ‘quality’ and ‘tabloid’ newspapers, or between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ television.”

    1990s–present: Sex offenders

    The media narrative of a sex offender highlighting egregious offenses as typical behavior of any sex offender, and media distorting the facts of some cases, has led legislators to attack judicial discretion, making sex offender registration mandatory based on certain listed offenses rather than individual risk or the actual severity of the crime, thus practically catching less serious offenders under the domain of harsh sex offender laws.

    2000s: Human trafficking

    Many critics of contemporary anti-prostitution activism argue that much of the current concern about human trafficking and its more general conflation with prostitution and other forms of sex work have all the hallmarks of a moral panic. They further argue that this moral panic shares much in common with the 'white slavery' panic of a century earlier as prompted passage of the Mann Act.

    2003-2004: SARS

    Globalization increases the likelihood that an infectious disease appearing in one area of the world will spread rapidly to another. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a recent example of this. Within weeks in the beginning of 2003, SARS had quickly spread from the Guangdong province of China to infect people in over 20 countries around the world. Approximately 15% of patients affected required artificial ventilation. There was also a relatively high death rate. By late March, hundreds of people were infected, with cases reported in China, Singapore, Canada, United States and Thailand. The WHO (World Health Organization) then took the rare step of issuing a worldwide alert. SARS was first reported in the United Kingdom newspapers early March of that year. Reviewing the many reports of the new infectious diseases in the newspapers, highlighted larger public anxieties, in particular anxieties about the insufficiency of technology and medicine that does not have the capacity for new threats as well as moral panic over globalization. Globalization has many definitions: It can be the spread of information, trends, technologies, culture and lifestyles but primarily it is an economic force. One of many consequences of an economic globalization is the quick, cheap access for the mobility of people of all walks of life. Another consequence is larger awareness of global threats and in particular the threat of global epidemics.

    2009-2010: Swine Flu/H1N1

    H1N1, properly known as swine-origin influenza A/H1N1 virus, was first recognized in 2009, in civilians in Mexico. The 2009 pandemic was a compilation of previous swine flu viruses. It is a zoonotic pathogen, a disease that normally exists in swine but can affect humans. As mentioned in Virology Journal, H1N1 could have been a cause of genetic distortion of earlier forms of swine flu viruses that affected Europe and Asia in the 90’s. From the JRSM journals, it refers to our society as ‘risk society’, the journal mentions how "Modernity creates risk by our increasingly busy and urbanized way of life, which includes working conditions, various modes of transport, pollution and infections… subsequently, the modern world is more susceptible to periods of moral panic than ever before." The statement suggests that with the advancement of society and the hyper-awareness is potentially putting people at risk.

    2013-2016: Ebola

    The Ebola virus, clinically referred to as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a sometimes fatal diseases in humans, and usually fatal if untreated. It was first diagnosed in patients in West Africa in 2013. It was the largest outbreak of Ebola since the 1976 outbreaks in South Sudan and the Republic of Congo. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that the virus was named after the Ebola River where the illness first appeared in 1976. “The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission." The epidemic and subsequent panic caused difficulties for people traveling across international borders. Ebola was seen as the ‘folk devil’ from Cohen's study on youth culture. The idea of Ebola spread mass panic in many countries, due to its wide coverage on various news outlets and talk shows. Although it was not as contagious as influenza H1N1, it caused tremendous panic and fear.

    2015-present: Zika

    Zika virus (ZIKV) which originated from Uganda, "is carried by mosquitos, which includes the mosquito species responsible for spreading dengue and yellow fever". The disease was first seen in patients as a dengue-like syndrome which is a mosquito-borne- tropical disease caused by dengue virus. In early 2015, several cases of patients presenting symptoms of mild fever, rash, conjunctivitis and arthralgia were reported in the northeastern Brazil. The fast-paced spread of the virus was alarming, and in accordance with the idea of the moral panic by Cohan, the fear itself was stagnating an entire population and the health and wellbeing of the nation of Brazil was under scrutiny. A major issue was in pregnant women. Some Brazilian women infected with Zika gave birth to children with microcephaly, a potentially devastating condition of brain maldevelopment. Not only did the disease spread worry, the notion that babies were getting harmed led government officials to call for the regulation of pregnancy among women.

    Criticism

    In a more recent edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Cohen outlines some of the criticisms that have arisen in response to moral panic theory. One of these is of the term "panic" itself, as it has connotations of irrationality and a lack of control. Cohen maintains that "panic" is a suitable term when used as an extended metaphor.

    Another criticism is that of disproportionality. The problem with this argument is that there is no way to measure what a proportionate reaction should be to a specific action. Jarrett Thibodeaux (2014) further argues that the criteria of disproportionality erroneously assumes that a social problem should correspond with some objective criteria of harm. The idea that a social problem should correspond with some objective criteria of harm, but is a moral panic when it does not, is a 'constructionism of the gaps' line of explanation.

    In "Rethinking 'moral panic' for multi-mediated social worlds", Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton argue "that it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as the social relations which support it, should be revised". Their argument is that mass media has changed since the concept of moral panic emerged so "that 'folk devils' are less marginalized than they once were", and that 'folk devils' are not only castigated by mass media but supported and defended by it as well. They also suggest that the "points of social control" that moral panics used to rest on "have undergone some degree of shift, if not transformation".

    The British criminologist Yvonne Jewkes has also raised issue with the term 'morality', how it is accepted unproblematically in the concept of 'moral panic' and how most research into moral panics fails to approach the term critically but instead accepts it at face value. Jewkes goes on to argue that the thesis and the way it has been used fails to distinguish between crimes that quite rightly offend human morality, and thus elicit a justifiable reaction, and those that demonise minorities. The public are not sufficiently gullible to keep accepting the latter and allowing themselves to be manipulated by the media and the government.

    Another British criminologist, Steve Hall, goes a step further to suggest that the term 'moral panic' is a fundamental category error. Hall argues that although some crimes are sensationalized by the media, in the general structure of the crime/control narrative the ability of the existing state and criminal justice system to protect the public is also overstated. Public concern is whipped up only for the purpose of being soothed, which produces not panic but the opposite, comfort and complacency.

    Echoing another point Hall makes, the sociologists Thompson and Williams argue that the concept of 'moral panic' is not a rational response to the phenomenon of social reaction, but itself a product of the irrational middle-class fear of the imagined working-class 'mob'. Using as an example a peaceful and lawful protest staged by local mothers against the re-housing of sex-offenders on their estate, Thompson and Williams show how the sensationalist demonization of the protesters by moral panic theorists and the liberal press was just as irrational as the demonization of the sex offenders by the protesters and the tabloid press.

    Many sociologists and criminologist (Ungar, Hier, Rohloff) have revised Cohen's original framework. The revisions are compatible with the way in which Cohen theorizes panics in the third Introduction to Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

    Other

    The term was used in 1830, in a way that completely differs from its modern social science application, by a religious magazine regarding a sermon. The phrase was used again in 1831, with an intent that is possibly closer to its modern use.

    References

    Moral panic Wikipedia