moral panics

• folk devils 


  groups who are deemed a threat by society due to media amplifying this
• moral entrepreneurs

  • an individual, group, or formal organization that seeks to influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm
  • Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians, police chiefs, bishops and other ‘respectable’ authorities condemn the group and its behaviour.
• Cohen - inventory

  • uses the analogy of a disaster, where the media produce an inventory or stocktaking of what happened
  • Cohen says this inventory contained three elements:
  • exaggeration and distortion
  • prediction
  • symbolisation
• Cohen examines the media’s response to disturbances between two groups of largely working-class teenagers, the mods and the rockers, at English seaside resorts from 1964 to 1966, and the way in which this created a moral panic.
• mods - wore smart dress, rode scooters
• rockers - wore leather jackets, motorbikes
• The initial confrontations started on a cold, wet Easter weekend in 1964 at Clacton, with a few scuffles, some stone throwing, some windows being broken and some beach huts wrecked.
• deviance amplification spiral

  • media makes cases seem as if a problem is spreading and getting out of hand.
  • mods and rockers case led to calls for increase control response from the police
  • this produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation of the mods and rockers as deviants, and less and less tolerance of them, and so on in an upward spiral.
• functionalist perspective of moral panics

  • moral panics can be seen as ways of responding to the sense of anomie or normlessness created by change. 
  • By dramatising the threat to society in the form of a folk devil, the media raises the collective consciousness and reasserts social controls when central values are threatened.
• hall et al

  • neo-marxist
  • argue the moral panic of 'mugging' in 70s was used to distract public from crisis of capitalism, dividing the working class on racial grounds and legitimise authoritarian style of rule
• examples of modern folk devils in media

  • travellers
  • asylum seekers
  • aids
  • single parents
• criticisms of moral panics

  • assumes societal reaction is always an overreaction - some may not care
  • mcrobbie and Thornton - argue that moral panics are now routine and have less impact
  • late modernity - there is little consensus about what is deviant
  • audiences are more active and no longer have collectivist reactions
  • changing attitudes