Moral panic

ontological assumptions regarding the creation of moral panic. An assessment of how the media can heavily affect societal norms regarding definitions of deviance will also be considered. The politicisation of young people as the result of secondary deviance will be critically examined in relation to the genre of dance music and the punk culture of the 1970s. It can be suggested that in order to critically examine Cohen’s theory regarding the creation of moral panics within society it would be…

The concept of moral panic was originally developed by Cohen (1972) as a media-induced exaggeration or distortion of some perceived threat or deviant activity. As he puts it, moral panic happens when a ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’. According to Brayton (2006), three actors need to exist for a moral panic to take hold. First, individuals who are responsible for deviant…

Alant Hunt, makes a point that moral panics are part of wider dynamics of “moral panics” in which some agents act to “problematize the conduct, values or culture of others and seek to act upon them though moralizing discourses, moralizing, practises, and religion.”(cited in Krinsky, C. 2013, p.134)The contemporary example of moral panic issue surrounding ‘gay-propaganda’ law in Russia was justified by the Russian politician Vitaly Milonov, as the need to protect children from being corrupted and…

In “Mind Over Mass Media” by Steven Pinker, Pinker explains the “moral panics” caused by new forms of media. Pinker persuades the reader that most panics caused by the media are either overly exaggerated or just false. Pinker effectively uses historical evidence, logical analysis, and some humor mixed in with a lot of sarcasm to back up his main statement “But such panics often fail reality checks.” Pinker also provides some scientific evidence but most of his arguments are logically proven with…

Media outlets select what to include or exclude in the stories they publish so as to have a specific effect on the public. Whether it is to incite moral panic, force a coming together of a community or to simply provide an alternate voice to a story. It is through this process of selection by media outlets that the public is subject to different narrative styles that depict the same story in different ways. This comparison can be seen in the way different media outlets presented the story of the…

hazardous as “a set of circumstances which cause harmful consequences”, while risk is the “likelihood of it doing so” (Lupton, p.12, 1999). This creates the hazard/risk differentiation or moral panic. This moral panic is what the media controls, as the more they report on certain issues the more they become a moral panic. As stated previously, without a critical mind to critic these reports anything the media say come fact. An example of this is the fear…

The mass media and political institutions creates moral panic in the society to achieve social, economic and political goals. The general public experience intense feelings of fear and anxiety as their perceived perceptions are threatened by the sudden burst of a new social problem or an existing phenomenon like domestic violence (Garland 2008, p. 13). People start to challenge the social, economic and moral standards behind the issue, transformations in multiple aspects including public…

Bias in History: Analogies of Witch Hunts and McCarthyism Going through high school in my small hometown, I would always hear about McCarthyism, or the Second Red Scare, in a poor context. One common analogy I heard was connecting McCarthyism to the witch hunts that I would hear about from the medieval period. This shows a bias has been developed against the topic and is now ingrained into society. To examine this topic I looked at sources involving both McCarthyism and the witch hunts. While…

##Addressing “Sensationalism” and Moral Panics Sensationalism is news media has been both a subject of and a bolstering contributor to moral panics ins the United States since the beginning of descriptive crime news reporting of the *New York Sun*in 1833 (Lots, 1991). The “sensation” and exaggeration of crime and criminality to the masses created a cascade of moral and ideological counter movements, which increased “fear of crime” (?), that overlaps frequently with moral panic(?). Crime news has…

According to Lisa Tasliki's work, she argued that moral panics are caused by the rapid development of social change and also effected by technological development. The author thinks that involving the gender of girls through the positive account of childhood and its contract with popular media. In addition, the author discussed that children can use online technologies to get information, but it did not give a standard to divided sex information into age account which means that children get…