Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for a Multi-Mediated Social World (1995)

Abstract

‘Moral panic’ is a term regularly used by journalists to describe a process which politicians, commercial promoters and media habitually attempt to incite. Despite the Enormous Attention to and countless applications of moral panic theory by media criminologists, very few people have looked critically at the concept itself, or explored how it might require updating for a twenty-first-century media environment. The 1990s youth culture is steeped in the legacy of ‘moral panics’; fighting mods and rockers, drug-taking hippies, foul-mouthed punks and gender-bending New Romantics are part of their celebrated folklore. The delicate balance of relations which the moral panic sociologists saw existing between media, agents of social control, folk devils and moral guardians, has given way to a much more complicated and fragmented set of connections. The strength of the old models of moral panic was that they marked the connection between ‘the media’ and ‘social control’.