The Role Of Media In The Construction Of Moral Panics

Abstract

In a society, wherein journalists, detectives, and individuals co-exist within a diverse cultural system, consideration of the relationship between media, society, and criminology is of paramount importance. This article begins by understanding the news-making process, and examining how this process affects the public in perceiving social reality. It also analyzes the interactions between the media and the public, and the role of the media, particularly the news media outlets, in the construction of moral panics with examples of media reporting of moral panics from before the coinage of the term through to more contemporary examples. The term moral panic is a sociological concept which has been adopted broadly both by the mass media and in everyday usage to refer to a magnified reaction to almost all anti-social behaviours. It has recently become a subject of widespread debate since Stanley Cohen’s seminal work Folk Devils and Moral Panics where he defines the concept as occasional events which subject society to bouts of moral panics, laying a particular stress on the mass media as an “especially important carrier and producer of moral panics”. These episodes might be relatively trivial or routine but are fashioned, sensationalized, and publicized by the mass media. Such publicity eventually results in the accretion of general anxiety and concern about these episodes. So, this article focuses on moral panic as a magnified reaction to a sort of behaviour that is believed to be a social problem.