CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Topic: Moral Panic

Scope:

Purpose:

Moral panic has had an impact not just on sociology but also on the language of cultural
debate and on the practice of journalists and politicians
Earlier moral panic was a rigorously defined sociological concept

Cohen: Moral Panic is a period wherein a condition, episode, person or group of persons
emerges to be become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. He also says that
their nature is presented in a stereotypical fashion by the mass media; object of panic could
be something novel or something that has always existed but only recently come into the
limelight

Goode and Ben Yehuda: 5 features of moral panic:

 Concern: Some reported conduct or event sparks anxiety
 Hostility: Perpetrators are portrayed as folk devils
 Consensus: Negative reaction is broad and unified
 Disproportionality: The extent of the conduct or the threat it poses are exaggerated
 Volatility – The media’s reporting and the associated panic emerge suddenly but can
dissipate quickly too
Author: there is two more elements
 Moral dimension of the social reaction – introspective soul searching that
accompanies these episodes
 The idea that the deviant conduct is somehow symptomatic
The reason the author says these are important is because they point to the try nature of the
underlying disturbance which is the anxious concern on the part of certain social actors that
an established value system is being threatened
Successful moral panics owe their appeal to their ability to find points of resonance with
wider anxieties

There are different types of moral panic: they vary in intensity, duration and social impact
They also vary on the causation but general facilitating conditions include:
 The existence of a sensationalist mass media (effective manner of communication)
 The discovery of some new or hitherto unreported form of deviance
 The existence of a marginalized, outsider group which is suitable for portrayal as folk
devil
 An already primed, sensitized public audience

Relationship between moral panic and their folk devils – interactive. Deviance amplification
happens because of media attention and increased social control which in turn prompts a
 hardening of the original deviance or even an enhancement of its attraction for potential
deviance
Author: A specific group of deviants is singled out for folk devil status in large part because
they possess characteristics that make it a suitable screen upon which society can project
sentiments of the guilt and ambivalences (cultural scapegoats). Example: paedophilia
Mass media is a prime mover and the prime beneficiaries of episodes of moral panic as they
generate news that appeals to the imagination and the concerns of their reader

Moral panic has long term substantial effects – example war on drugs lead to mass
imprisonment in the USA
It gives legitimacy to a more than usual exercise of control by the state
Over time, it creates social divisions and redistributes social status as well as building
infrastructures of regulations and control that persist long after the initial episode has run its
course

Over the years, there has been a change in the cultural conditions such as the emergence of
alternative youth press, existence of counter-experts and activists
These suggest a shift away from moral panics (which is a vertical relation between society
and deviant group) to a more ‘culture war’ type situation (more horizontal conflict between
social groups)
This means that the power imbalance is a lot less asymmetrical and instead triggers a defiant
response from the ‘folk devils’
Additionally, people are more aware of the media’s actions since they have become
somewhat routine and predictable – the players align themselves with escalations or de-
escalations depending on their interest when the media reflexively comments on its own
practice

THE CONCEPT AND ITS USES

Durkheimian elements of Cohen’s theory is an extension of Durkheim’s theory of deviance
reaction
The focus on power and profit and self-interested manipulation has tended to overshadow
the moral and psychological connotation of the concept

Origins

Term moral panic emerged from late 1960s social reaction theory – especially the concern
with the media’s role in stereotyping and misrepresenting deviance and the perception that
such reporting might contribute to a deviance amplification spiral
Said that the cultural source could be from the National Deviancy Conference – since they
got closer to the deviants than to their controllers
Two level critique
 Empirical mistake prompted by misplaced anxiety
 Normative – focused on the form of the social reaction and more critical of its
moralizing judgmental stance (the need to moralize things)
This was done initially in the context of victimless crimes such as soft drug use, sexual
deviance and juvenile offending
However, down the line this was pushed to include more crimes and the analysis was
extended
 It began being used as a scapegoat of sorts by dismissing claims that the real crime rates
were increasing or that members of the public ought to feel insecure
Author: The concept is powerful and illuminating and therefore, the care and precision of its
original application is forgotten as its use becomes more general and indiscriminate

Actors, Observers and Sceptics

Moral panic is almost always an outside observer’s category and not a self-description of the
participants (at least while the are participating)

Conceptual Problem and limitations

Proportion
 Point of departure for any moral panic analysis is a claim that a particular reaction is
somehow disproportionate to the deviance it condemns
 Assumption of disproportionality invites empirical dispute about the real nature and
the extent of the underlying problem
 Even when you are judging proportionality, the question of proportionate to what
comes up – nothing is objective and everything is subjective
Moral Judgements
 It is difficult to assess the extent of material damage or the size of the risk makes it
difficult to assess the validity of the moral judgments made by others – when I say it
is moral panic, I am disregarding the moral viewpoint of others
Unhinged Reaction
 Social reactions to deviant behavior, like moral panics, have their own dynamics and
can shape the issues they address. But it's essential to remember that these
reactions are often triggered by underlying deviant behavior. To understand this, we
need to study both the reactions and the deviance and how they are connected. This
helps us see how society deals with deviant behavior through things like laws and
social control
Anthropomorphising
 The idea that society can engage in panic stricken behaviour seems to involve an
illegitimate rending of collective social processes as individualistic psychological ones
 The author talks about how earlier analyses of moral panics tended to oversimplify
"society" and "social reaction" without considering the diverse interests and
motivations of different actors like the media, police, government, and the public.
However, modern literature acknowledges the complexity of these processes,
realizing that society is not a unified entity
The Ethics of Attribution
 The critical ascriptions that the word brings with it shapes its usage – some
situations may invite a moral panic analysis, but the ethical considerations make the
attribution seem tactless, morally insensitive or otherwise inappropriate

Denial is a constrastive conept that operates in the same general framework as moral panic –
it is the refusal to permit sa disturbing event access to consciousness
 Literal denial (nothing happened)
  Interpretive denial (something happened but its not what you think)
 Implicatory denial (what happened was not really bad and can be justified)
If you consider Denial, then it is apparent that you should take the study of moral panic
together and not alone and look at what they call the sociology of moral raction
Cultural trauma might be an antithesis to the conept of moral panic – it intends to maek a
profound moral event and its lasting cultural conteexts
Jeffery Alexander: identify events that provoke deep moral concerns and societal resposine
and to trace the wounds that these traumas leave to culture – examples slavery and the
Holocaust

Risk society reactions:

 Ine can distinguish moral panics from the kind of social reactions produced by the
threat of glabal warming by pointing to the issues of scale and integriyy
 Moral panics involve anxious disapproval of moral threats wheras risk society theats
involve fearful uncertainity about material hazards

Personal examples that can be given: Criminal tribes in India