The media is the major way of observing what is happening in the world, without it we would have to rely on the assurance of others, leaving the individual to determine what is factual, and what has lent itself to the Chinese-whisper effect - embellishments, hype, and sensationalised accounts of what actually occurred. However, the question that must be asked is, is this not like the media?

    The media prides itself on objective reporting and journalistic integrity (Schissel, 1997), albeit, the media - the news - is governed by the community on a supply-aand-demand basis (Ibid.); what happens on a ‘slow news day’? The media often finds itself sensationalising events, or embellishing previously reported occurrences so as to appease the audiences; more often than not, the disaffiliated, or marginalised, segments of the community, particularly the youth, find itself at the end of this opportunistic reporting. Schissel (1997) suggests, "television news teeters on the edge between fact and fiction" and "though they [forms of news accounts] are mandated to be based on an objective reality, are largely based on consumer demand," thus it is quite easy to espy how concerns within society, especially over youth crime, are formulated and fuelled by the media. Such moral concerns are referred to as moral panics.

    The term, moral panic, was made popular by Stanley Cohen’s (1972) observation of the Mods and Rockers’ incident in Clacton, England on Easter Sunday, 1964. Here, the media’s reports over the seriousness of the events were
 

exaggerated and distorted - in terms of the number of young people involved, the nature of the violence committed, the amount of damage inflicted, and their impact on the community...Obviously false stories were reported as true; unconfirmed rumours were taken as fresh evidence of further atrocities.
(pp.31ff; cited in Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994, p.23)

    This was supported by Slovic, Fischoff, and Lichenstein, in the 1980s, whilst referring to Cohen’s (1967) term community sensitisation (the immediate notice, comment, judgement, and reaction to small deviations from the norm after the classification of a certain behaviour, and category of deviants has been identified)(Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994, p.24), that "the media plays a key role in this process; more dramatic effects are more newsworthy, more likely to be recalled by viewers and readers, and therefore more likely to be thought of by the public as recent" (Ibid., p.97).

    Moral panics erstwhile resurface when a new, but similar, topic of concern arises in the public domain. These panics, when specifically generated by the mass media (radio, television, cinema, and print)(Springhall, 1998, p.160), are called media panics. Socially, these are used to attempt to re-establish the status-quo, and culturally, to act to prevent the undermining of the cultural elite as a critical force (Ibid.)

    The media usually portrays and conveys youth crime panics based on race, gender, class, and geography, targeting those who are particularly vulnerable, marginal, and identifiable (Schissel, 1997) by dramatising, embellishing, and sensationalising articles and reports, as well as utilising their power and authoritative contacts and position to instil a fear, preying on the, already, prejudicial and discriminatory, beliefs of society.

continue


Navigation Bar
Email    Author's details   Essay   Credits   Links