Chapter 3 - Media and Moral Panics

Labeling

A sociological approach to crimes and deviancy made famous by Becker (1963) that refers to the social processes by which certain groups (politicians, police, the media, and so on) classify and categorize others. Deviance is thus not inherent in any given act but is behavior that this is so labeled.

Moral Majority

A term that encapsulates the imagined community to which the popular press address themselves. Encompassing notions of conservativeness, respect for the law and its enforcers, and a certain version of "Britishness," it assumes consensus on the part of the readership and can be summed up as the Daily Mail view of the world.

Subculture

Generally used to describe groups of young people whose appearance, norms, and behavior differe from those of the mainstream or "parent" culture.

Deviancy Amplification Spiral

The moral discourse established by journalists and various other authorities, opinion leaders, and moral entrepreneurs, who collectively demonize a perceived wrongdoer (or group of wrongdoers) as a source of moral decline and social disintegration, thus setting off a chain of public, political, and police reaction.

Stigmatizing

The process by which an invidual or group is discredited because of some aspect of their appearance or behavior. Stigmatization helps to explain why some percieved deviants are subjected to marginalization and social exclusion and are the recipients of hostile reporting and censure by the media.

Social Reaction

The social process characterizing responses to crime and deviance. Encompassing public, political, criminal justice, and media reactions, the term is often used to signify the processes of labeling, stereotyping, and stigmatizing of certain individuals and groups.

News Values in Moral Panic

Threshold, Predicability, Simplification

T/F "A brawl erupts within a mob of teens" sells better than "Four Youths got into an altercation"

True because language is important in meeting the value of threshold and such exaggerated and emotional language draws in an audience and captures public attention

Moral Panic Model

1.) A reasonably ordinary event is presented as an extraordinary occurance by the mass media. 2.) A moral discourse is established by journalists and other authorities who demonize target a source or indication of moral decline and social disintegration. Targets are reffered to in the early model as Folk Devils. 3.) A clarification of moral boundaries of society creates consensus that the threat is a problem that raises concerns with addressing it. 4.) Moral panics occur during rapid social changes and are linked to wider social anxities regarding risk 5.) Young people are typically targeted as they are metaphor for the future and provide a means to gauge the health of society and identify problems emerging in it.

Broad Types of people targeted by Moral Panics

1.) those who commit general criminal and antisocial acts, 2.) those who commit serious offenses including violence towards strangers and sexual predation of children and murder, 3.) those whose behavior deviate from organizational standards or normal codes of conduct in the workplace including strikes, 4.) those in groups adopting partterns of behaviors and styles of dress that are diffrerent from the accepted social normals of embedded culture they are in examples of these people can be goths, punks, hippies, and other subgroups. 5.) those who fail to conform to coservative ideals like traditional institutions like the family, drug users, or those who are HIV positive.

Risk

A concept tha emerged to dominant discussions of late modernity in the 1990s, the term "risk society" was coined by Beck to denote the social shift form the pre-industrial tendency ot view negative events as random acts of God or nature to the post-industrial preoccupation within manmade dangers and harms. The media are frequently conceptualized as the most prominent articulators of risk ( and thus the primary source of people's fear of crime) because of their seeming obsession with health scares, panics over food and diet, and, of course, crime.

Mega-Cases

Are those that take on a significance far greater than might be the case for other criminal events. They become socially, culturaly, politically, and historically important, bringing audience together as "mediated witnesses" or "virtual victims" and uniting them in an imagined community.

Signal Crime

Bearing some similarity to moral panics and the theory of "broken windows," signal crimes are incidents of offenses that, when see or experienced, may trigger a change in public beliefs or behaviors. It has become a familiar concept in policing because signal crimes can have a negative disproportionate impact on public perceptions of security.

Moral Panic

Media constructs moral panics according to criteria of a number of News Values from chapter two. Exaggeration and distortion are key elements to turn a potential news event into an actual story. This helps to meet the value of threshold. Language is an important compenet of this process. Predictability is involved in Moral Panics as the media predicts that what has happened will probably happen again; most often indicate that is going to happen with greater frequency and greater ferocity as time continues. Simplification is at play through a process of symbolization where names can be made to signify complex ideas and emotions; happening when one name of a group or an identifying of specific ideology is used to signify a whole complex of various issues, problems, and fears. Media constructed definitions of the situation are reinforced and all sides behave as expected within the model. All of these things are linked to concept called the deviancy amplification process. Hostile and disproportional social reaction to a condition, episode, person, or group defined as a threat. According to some, crime has moved so emphatically to the center of the media agenda, and has become so commercialized, that a virtual permanent state of moral panic exists because of the 24/7 news cycle.

Deviancy Amplification Process

Role of authorities in the Deviancy Amplification Process: Modern model of Moral panic with origins in past moral cursades, moral crusadors were those led by those with the authority of power to identify deviant behavior and direct a societal response to it. Historical examples include: the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, and the prohibition movement. Today's moral crusaders include journalists, politicians, pundits, and special interest groups. In the model, those in power label minority groups as subversive to exploit public fears regarding safety and social order. Minority groups in this context are not exactly based on racial or ethnic features just a distinctive feature or trait that separates them from accepted norms. For example: tattoos were reserved for sailors and ruffians with the view of the social order. Tattooed people could be a minority group in this context. The media is used to make moral statements regarding an individual, group, or behavior. After the public perceives the gravity of the problem, moralists step forward with a popular solution to the problem, usually such as increased punitive measures and increased policing. As the deviancy amplification cycle continues, increased public attention serves to validate media's concern with the issue while alienating those targeting by it. The alienated and marginalized may then increased deviant behavior as a response but frequently the increased attention either reveals existing behaviors that were previously unnoticed by authorities or creates a public perception of increasingly severe and frequent deviant acts. This sequent of events that results in the moral discourse to demonize a perceived wrong, as a source of moral decline, and social disintegration sets of a series of social reactions known as the deviancy amplification spiral. As negative social reaction escalates and the deviants become increasingly isolated, they become increasingly criminally oriented or at least identify more closely with the deviance that set them apart. This increases media attention and the outcry of opinion leaders which then raises public concerns and outrage, resulting in increases in policing and arrests, perpetuating the groups marginalization and continuing the spiraling cycle of deviancy amplification. Defining moral boundaries and creating consensus in moral panics and deviance amplification is important. Identification of a group as "us" meaning those who are decent, respectable, righteous and moral, and another group as "them" deviant, undesirable, outsiders. The perception of the threat as real, serious, and caused by an identifiable group of deviant actors does not have to be a universal belief and does not require a majority of the public to believe it because the national press will imply their condemnation of the threatening behavior is representative of a public consensus done by appealing to nostalgic conservative ideology, desires for retribution and the frequently touted notion that common sense should prevail in all matters. The notions draw on the premise that things are not the way they used to be which echoes mass society theory. Moral Panics draw together communities and a sense of collective outrage. They demonstrate there are limits to how much diversity can be tolerated in a society and they confirm the authority of those who make such judgements. Rapid social changes of modern society has been characterized by an increased perception of risk. Western Society has become increasingly focused on risk and are risk averse in many circumstances where the awareness of the potential dangers to individuals, groups, and global concerns have overridden the traditional and more mundane aspects of modern life. The concept of moral panics might be said to have further parallels with disaster models and its capacity to expose to the public domain behavior, attitudes, and emotions which are usually confined to the private sphere through a sequence of warning impact reaction. There is an issue of proportionality at play with moral panics that gauge the public's level of concern against that outside of media motivations. Problems become the subject of moral panics when they are familiar, close at hand, and appear to directly impinge on individual lives. Youth are popular examples of a source of moral panic. Youth as problem was a social construct that emerged in the 1950s. Prior to the second world war, young people tended to model themselves on their parents and youth were seen as little adults. Youth came into its own in the post-war era. Through American popular culture, youth became a social category distinct from other social groups. Youth rejected their parents values and interests and became powerful consumers and citizens in their own right and on their own terms. Teens enjoyed affluence not previously known by youth in the past. Traditional class boundaries were broken down as commercial enterprises homogenized teenagers into a single consumer group with a range of cultural products targeted specifically for them. Which included music, clothes, literature, cinema, and so on. The threat of youth emerged due to these rapid social changes wed to distinctive and unconventional styles related to their parents and behavior. The rebellion against authority and rejection of everything that was traditional and conventional was perceived as a great danger to existing social order. Youth are seen as both a catalyst for change and guardians of future morality. They personify progress and innovation but also channel the fear society has about change and the unknown. This lead to significant societal reactions that will be further discussed later in the class.

consensus

The achievement of social unity through shared agreement. Critical criminologists suggest that, far from being conceived in terms of consensus, socities, are actually charactized by conflicts between social groups and classes whose interest are opposed and incompatible. Some of these groups exercise power and hold positions of advantage over others. In this interpretation, concensus is seen as constructed and imposed in order to maintain the privileged position of dominant groups. Consesus might thus be achieved subtly and hegemonically.

Deminization

The act of labeling individuals or groups whose norms, attitudes, or behavior is seen to constitute "evilness." those who are demonized are traditionally characterized as folk devils and are the subjects or moral panic (Cohen 1972/2002), although it is arguable that ascriptions of "pure evil" are becoming more salient than the rather less potent image of folk devilry.

Youth

The imprecise period between infancy and adulthood. In media reporting crime, youth tends to be more frequently linked to offending than victimization.

Problems with the Moral Panic Model

Two common flawed approaches to its application: 1) the failure to go beyond the original text presented by Stanley Cohen and other theorists. The unreflective adherence to his theoretical premises is problematic and fails to update the model to modern occurences and the current understandings of the interrelationship between media, crime, and the public. 2.) The tendency to overextend the concept of moral panics to all public concerns diluting its explanatory power and obscuring alternative explanations because not all media and social policy interactions are moral panics. This misuse fails to properly inform the complext relationship between social issues, media reporting, public opinion, and social policy because moral panic is part of the answer but not the entirety of it. This is revealed by a number of failings in the model. Many of the problems are involved with the basic conceptual definitions used such as deviance, morality, youth, and style. In the deviance amplification spiral, deviance is conceptualized problamatically by: first the trail folk devils who are the deviant targets of moral outrage is flawed because not all folk devils are vulnerable or unfairly maligned like pedophiles. The accelerating loss of credibility

Concept of Moral Panic

originated in British sociology in the 1970s defined by scholars including Stanley Cohen, Jock Young, and Stuart Hall. American sociological studies of social pathology, labeling theory, and deliquence and drift are foundations of the concept of Moral Panic