Shark Cull and Moral Panic
The occurrence of three shark attacks had been concentrated in three weeks so much so that it generated the public concern about the safety of the swimmers and the considerable pressure on the government to implement risk-control policy. A state government policy of capturing and killing large sharks near swimming beaches using baited drum lines, also known as ‘shark cull’, was implemented in 2014. But people’s questions about government’s response led to the sociological thinking about if the Western Australian response to shark attacks is an example of moral panic. Comparing the events with the five elements of typical moral panic according to the sociological theory contributed by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2009), this …show more content…
The construction of the threat by mass media is central to sociological analysis of moral panic. And mass media is often exaggerating, so Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2009) emphasized that in a case of moral panic “public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm” (p. 40). Irrational perception of threat or crisis is the product of modern mass media that sell eye-catching stories for profits. A study (Muter, et al., 2012) shows that the most media coverage of shark attack in Australia “emphasized the risks sharks pose to people” instead of recognizing “the rarity of shark attacks” and “preventative measures water users can take to reduce their vulnerability to shark encounters” (p. 187). And the biased media coverage leads to the public fear and anxiety that are disproportionate to the real degree of threat. Similar thing happened in the shark attack in Florida, 2001 (Sunstein & Zeckhauser, 2011). Therefore, in this regard, the high demanding of shark cull could be seen as an example of moral panic. The last question is if it will go away …show more content…
A good example of this is people’s concern over gun violence in the United States, which only reaches its peak when innocent people are killed, quickly ceased to be a subject of national news, and is pick up by the public only when the next tragedy happens. Similarly, people were certainly reassured by the measure taken by the Government (and this is a case in which a moral panic is institutionalized) and that nobody was hurt for a given period of time, but public concern would be aroused again when somebody else are killed or wounded by
The occurrence of three shark attacks had been concentrated in three weeks so much so that it generated the public concern about the safety of the swimmers and the considerable pressure on the government to implement risk-control policy. A state government policy of capturing and killing large sharks near swimming beaches using baited drum lines, also known as ‘shark cull’, was implemented in 2014. But people’s questions about government’s response led to the sociological thinking about if the Western Australian response to shark attacks is an example of moral panic. Comparing the events with the five elements of typical moral panic according to the sociological theory contributed by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2009), this …show more content…
The construction of the threat by mass media is central to sociological analysis of moral panic. And mass media is often exaggerating, so Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2009) emphasized that in a case of moral panic “public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm” (p. 40). Irrational perception of threat or crisis is the product of modern mass media that sell eye-catching stories for profits. A study (Muter, et al., 2012) shows that the most media coverage of shark attack in Australia “emphasized the risks sharks pose to people” instead of recognizing “the rarity of shark attacks” and “preventative measures water users can take to reduce their vulnerability to shark encounters” (p. 187). And the biased media coverage leads to the public fear and anxiety that are disproportionate to the real degree of threat. Similar thing happened in the shark attack in Florida, 2001 (Sunstein & Zeckhauser, 2011). Therefore, in this regard, the high demanding of shark cull could be seen as an example of moral panic. The last question is if it will go away …show more content…
A good example of this is people’s concern over gun violence in the United States, which only reaches its peak when innocent people are killed, quickly ceased to be a subject of national news, and is pick up by the public only when the next tragedy happens. Similarly, people were certainly reassured by the measure taken by the Government (and this is a case in which a moral panic is institutionalized) and that nobody was hurt for a given period of time, but public concern would be aroused again when somebody else are killed or wounded by