Book Review: Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives, edited by Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley

Abstract

Moral Panics, Social Fears, and Media: Historical Perspectives. Siân Nicholas and Tom O'Malley, eds. New York: Routledge, 2013. 246 pp. $140 hbk.What triggers and feeds fear in society? That is challenging question addressed in Moral Panics, Social Fears, and Media, and, as title suggests, media are often culprit. Here, Siân Nicholas and Tom O'Malley have edited a worthy collection of essays that define and illustrate useful theoretical construct of moral panic, a term first coined in 1970s by Stanley Cohen, who noted, Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panics. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. . His idea grew out of explosion of cultural studies work of late 1960s and 1970s, especially as ideas about power and its relationship to language and discourse came to dominate a great part of debate. Of course, these social inflamed by media often result in public calls for social elites to take action that, as O'Malley noted, reflects a 'fundamentally inappropriate' response to a perceived threat. What sets this particular collection apart from contemporary applications of theory is its emphasis on past media behavior and how it effected social change, revealing that (news) media can be placed firmly at centre of historical accounts of social change and can be directed in certain ways.The book's three parts and thirteen chapters neatly delineate theoretical definitions from their application. The book's first part provides ample explanation about what constitutes a moral panic and its various transformations since Cohen's first articulation. Chas Critcher, a preeminent scholar in this area, stresses that Cohen's model and all subsequent variations are hardy and useful for studying media and media behavior over time and across national borders. However, as editors warn, blanket application of any moral panic model must be thoughtfully executed because relationship among the media, moral panics and social fears is far too complex to apply whenever social manifest themselves. The second part explores media as object of panic, and final chapters concern media promotion of social fears.The chapters concerning new media technologies as objects of fear serve to remind, as Gabriele Balbi, observed, This capacity to scare has characterized advent of all media and also (and above all) so-called new media. While Balbi's work focused on introduction of telephone in Italy, another chapter examined cinema as an object of fear, especially when its content expressed ideas that a dominant group found threatening. …