moral panics Flashcards
Cohen - Moral panics
The Mods and Rockers - The media over exaggerated the row between two groups which created a moral panic. The first disagreement was very small which happened at Clacton on Sea. The media portrayed the friction between the two groups as a big/violent feud which it wasn’t. The media created a moral panic by using melodramatic vocabulary, eg, terror, riot, attack and shocking pictures.
Thornton - Moral panics
Studies ravers in the 90s and applied the work of Cohen to this movement. She found evidence of a moral panic surrounding Ravers and drug taking. Thornton did an ethnography and discovered that the reality or the situation was very different to what was being presented in the media. (Link to Death or Leah Betts from ecstasy as an example).
Made audiences so concerned they campaigned for legislation change, from this Acid House music got banned due to its association with youth drug taking.
Goode and Ben Yehuda - Moral panics
5 elements present in a moral panic: Concern- must be the belief that the group is deemed deviant and likely to have a negative effect on society.
Hostility- they become folk devils, causing division between them and us.
Consensus- widespread acceptance that the group poses a very real threat to society.
Disproportionality- the action taken is disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the group.
Volatility- moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared because public interest wanes.
Furedi - Moral panics
Reflects older generation - argues that moral panics arise when society fails to adapt to dramatic social changes and feels that there is a loss of control. Moral panics reflect the wider concerns that the older generation holds. They believe the media is responsible for the loss of traditional norms and values. They feel a sense of loss and this makes them more vulnerable to the anxieties that come with moral panic.
McRobbie - Moral panics
Argues that moral panics are no longer about social control but rather about the fear of being out of control.
McRobbie and Thornton - Moral panics
Suggests some parts of the media have become so sophisticated in understanding how deviancy amplification works that “moral panics, once the unintended outcome of the journalist practice, seem to have become a goal” - meaning they attempt to create stories that aim to have some form of shock value, rather than because there is an actual moral outrage.
