The News and moral panics✅
Presentation of news
The way news items are presented may be important in influencing how people are encouraged to view stories. For example the physical position of a news story on a website or in a newspaper, the order of importance given to stories in TV news bulletins, the choice of headlines, and whether there is accompanying film or photographs, the camera angles used and so on, will all influence the attention given to particular issues.
Some issues may not be covered at all if journalists or camera crews are not available, especially in international news reporting, and the space available in a newspaper or TV programme will influence whether an event is reported or not.
A story may be treated sensationally, and it may even be considered of such major importance as to justify a TV or radio ‘newsflash’.
Where film is used, the pictures shown are always selected from the total footage shot, and may not accurately reflect the event. The actual images used in news films may themselves have a hidden bias. For example, the GMG has shown how, in the reporting of industrial disputes, employers are often filmed in the peace and quiet of their offices, while workers are seen shouting on the picket lines or trying to be interviewed against a background of traffic noise. This gives the impression that employers are more calm and reasonable people and have a better case than the workers.
The media can also create false or biased impressions by the sort of language used in news reporting.
Emotive language - which stirs up emotions - may be used to liven up a story, placing a dramatic angle on events and thereby grabbing the audiences attention and interest, and to encourage audiences to make a particular interpretation of events.
For example, words like ‘pointless’, ‘troublemakers’, ‘thugs,’ ‘rioters, ‘scum’, ‘terrorist’, ‘atrocity’, ‘brutal’, or ‘scroungers’ encourage people to have a negative view of the people or events reported.
Inaccurate and false reporting and the creation of moral panics
False reporting, through either completely making up stories or inventing a few details, and the media’s tendency to exaggerate and dramatise events out of all proportion to their actual significance in society, typical of much reporting of the royal family, are devices used to make a story more interesting and attract audiences.
This is particularly common in the mass-circulation ‘red-top’ tabloid press, and their related websites. Such false, inaccurate or exaggerated and sensationalised reporting in the media can sometimes generate a moral panic.
Moral Panic - A wave of public concern about some exaggerated or imaginary threat to society, stirred up by overblown and sensationalised reporting in the media.
Moral panics are generated around activities or social groups which are defined as threatening to society or dominant social values.
The classing study of the media and moral panics was Cohen’s study of the Mods and Rockers youth subcultures in the 1960s.
Moral panics show the media’s power to define what is normal and what is deviant, unacceptable behaviour, and to reinforce a consensus around the core values of the dominant ideology, while at the same time making money through attracting audiences.
Process of moral panics
Moral panics usually begin when the media starts expressing concern over certain activities and the behaviour of certain groups, and exaggerating out of all proportion their real significance and the harm caused to society.
This exaggeration, often coupled with false reporting and dubious hearsay anecdotal evidence, can create public anxiety and hostility towards that group or activity, and encourage agencies like schools, social services the police and the courts to stamp down hard and take harsh measurements against the alleged troublemakers.
Such action, particularly by the police, can, in turn, generate more deviant behaviour, as people become alerted via the media to things they previously hadn’t been aware of, or as the groups concerned play up their behaviour to gain media attention, or react with hostility to those who are attempting to stop their activities.
This can often make what was a minor issue much worse - for example, arresting people can cause a reaction like resistance and hostility to the police, riots and more arrests - and amplify the original alleged deviance. This is known as deviancy amplification.
Deviancy amplification - Is the way the media may actually make worse or create the very deviance they condemn by their exaggerated, sensationalised and distorted reporting of events and their presence at them.
In recent years, moral panics have arisen around groups like asylum seekers, radicalised Muslims and internet paedophiles, and issues like anti-social behaviour and gun and knife culture among young people.
Media-generated moral panics often arise from many of the pressures discussed so far, such as the ever-growing need in the competitive world of the media to attract audiences through sensationalised, interesting and exciting dumbed-down news stories (even if there aren’t any) and infotainment, and thereby make money from advertisers.
Such methods mean the media can be accused of socially constructing the news and manufacturing unwarranted anxiety in their audiences.
Is the concept of moral panics still relevant in the new media age?
McRobbie and Thornton suggest that media-generated moral panics are now becoming less common. This is because new media technology and constant 24×7 rolling news reporting, and intense competition both between media organisations and between different types of media - such as web-based news - have changed the reporting of, and reaction by audiences to, events that might once have caused a moral panic.
Pluralists and postmodernists argue there is now a huge diversity of media reports and interpretations of events, and of opinons and reactions to these events by the public through citizen journalism, that people are now much more sceptical of mainstream media interpretations and less likely to believe them.
Most events that might once have generated a moral panics now have such short shelf-lives inn sustaining audience interest that they are unlikely to be newsworthy for long enough to become a moral panic.