A History of Acts of Deviance and Their Coverage by Media - Essay Example

Media representation There has been a history of acts of deviance and their coverage by media to produce moral panic in our society, and it is interesting that the concept has become part of everyday language. The term was first used by Jock Young (1971) with reference to the reaction to drug takers in Nottinghill, but it generally associated with his colleague, Stanley Cohen (1972), who defined it as follows: A condition, episode, person, group of persons, emerges to become defined as threat to societal values and interests: its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media: the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to (Cohen, 1972, p.9). A moral panic can be recognised in the intensity of feeling expressed by a large number of people about a specific group of people who appear to threaten the social order at a given time. These people become 'folk devils', about whom 'something needs to be done'. This 'something' usually takes the form of increased social control, which mean stricter laws, longer sentences, heavier fines and increased policing of specific areas. After the imposition of these new controls, the panic subsides until a new one emerges. It is interesting to analyse the contexts of moral panic because they invariably occur when powerful interests groups in society are facing troubled times. (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994). Media and moral panic Cohen and others (especially Jock Young in his The Drugtakers (1971)) showed how agents of social control, particularly the police, 'amplified' deviance. They also demonstrated the media's rle in this process and thus started to draw attention to the ideological rle of the media in actively constructing meanings, rather than merely 'reflecting' some supposedly shared reality. This approach was then developed by the Marxist critics of the media. Such studies were used to demonstrate how the media helped to avoid wider conflict in society by focusing our attention on the supposedly deviant behaviour of outsider groups, including youth 'gangs', 'welfare scroungers', trade union 'militants' and so on. By focusing attention in this way the media, it was claimed, contribute to creating and underpinning the social consensus on our society's core values. Fowler comes close to suggesting that there is a deliberate conspiracy between media owners and journalists to construct reality in this way, a view of the media sometimes referred to as conspiracy theory. This is a not uncommon view held by critics of the media and there is evidence to support the view that newspaper owners are prepared to skew the news to favour their class interests. However, this is not a matter which is of primary concern to the hegemony theorists of cultural studies, who pay more attention to the ways in which cultural leadership is achieved and secured through the media. They tend to take the view that there does not need to be any deliberate conspiracy since journalists simply present reality from the standpoint of what is 'obvious' and 'natural' - and what is 'obvious' and 'natural' is what the dominant discourse signifies as such. (Cavanagh, A.2007) Most societies at some time have been gripped by a moral panic and we need to know how to recognise one when it occurs. Sociologists are interested in the development of issues into moral panics. It is important to consider who actually has the power, if the power is the appropriate term here, to define the event as a moral panic, and it is also equally important at point the specific phenomenon becomes moral panic. The occurrence of moral panic Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) outline what they see as the five main features of a moral panic: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility. There must be awareness that the behaviour of a particular group or category is likely to have negative consequences for the rest of the society. This gives rise to public concern, which may be shown through public opinion polls and significantly through media coverage. There must be increased hostility directed at this group, and they may be referred to as the enemy of respectable society. They become 'folk devils' and a clear division opens between 'them', the threateners and 'us', the threatened. There must be fairly widespread acceptance that the threat posed by this group is a very real one to the rest of the society. The consensus does not necessarily have to be nationwide. But it is important that the moral entrepreneurs are vocal and that the voices of the opposition are weak and disorganised. It is implicit in the term 'disproportionality' that the societal reaction to the event is out of proportion. In a moral panic the public is given evidence in the form of statistics, which are often wildly exaggerated. Furthermore the statistics for drug addiction, attacks, victims, injuries, illness and so on are disproportionate to the actual threat exercised by the group or category. Moral panics, as the term implies are volatile. Any moral panic has a limited 'shelf life' although it might lie dormant for a long period of time and might also reappear during different historical periods. In general they erupt suddenly and just as quickly subside. However irrespective of whether or not there is a long-term impact, the public hostility generated during a moral panic is relatively short-lived: it is difficult to sustain antagonism at fever pitch for any length of time, public interest may wane or the news agenda setters may change the focus of attention. Moral panics occur most frequently in societies that are modern or undergoing modernisation; when this is the case, they may serve as a means of both strengthening and redrawing the moral boundaries in those societies. 'When a society's moral boundaries are sharp, clear and secure, and the central norms and values are strongly held by nearly everyone, moral panics rarely grip its members - nor do they need to' (Ben-Yehuda, 1985). Muncie (1987) argues that the moral panic thesis not only allows us to identify instances of media exaggeration and distortion, but also demonstrates that selective reporting by the media can be instrumental in generating crime waves and social problems. In this way the agencies of social control actually create more deviances as a result of the process of moral panic. This is often referred to as deviancy amplification, because 'people predisposed to the initial illegal activity may gravitate to the places where reporting is taking place, thus actually increasing the incidence of the phenomenon' (Lawson and Garrod, 1996). Despite the fact that the reported phenomenon has existed for a long time, the increasing media attention invokes public concern. Cohen's concept of moral panic lies within the perspectives of interactionism, labelling and even anomie theory. However Hall et.al. (1978) place it within a different tradition. Critical of the interactionist approach for its failure to examine power relations, they instead place the concept within a clear hegemonic framework of relations between the state, the law and the social class. For Hall et al. a moral panic is a means of distracting attention from a crisis within the capitalist state. Moral panic forms part of the legitimising process of identifying 'enemies within' while at the same time strengthening the power of the state. This ensures that the law and order debate will be promoted without public understanding of the social divisions and conflicts that help to produce the deviance and political conflict (Muncie, 1987). In Britain the mugging panic resulted in the imposition of more military-style policing in the inner city areas. Moral panic a can also be related to mass hysteria and collective delusions. According to Miller (1985) three features are associated wit mass hysteria: a mistaken belief that a threat is being posed by an agent, heightened emotion, especially fear; mobilisation on the part of a substantial part of the population. There is usually very little incidence of true mass hysteria, and even in the classic example of the reaction of some people to the radio broadcast of the 'War of the World' in 1938 there was actually little mass mobilisation. While it may be true that a considerable number of people have felt threatened by an outside agent, they have rarely resorted to flight. However there have been many examples of collective delusion. If we accept the idea that the moral panic is generated by fear of a threat and, often an inability or unwillingness to check the facts, then we can say that moral panic must be based on an aspect of mass hysteria, that is, exaggerated fear. Allegations of child abuse have been reported by the press throughout the 1990s. Specific cases of organised abuse were reported to be occurring in the Orkneys, Manchester and Nottingham, all of which were given wide coverage. Kitzinger and Skidmore (1994) examined the media coverage of child sexual abuse during 1991, the year when the Orkney case was dominant. They were interested in the process of news production and the extent to which concern about child sexual abuse (CSA) could be seen as a moral panic. They found that the social workers attracted the most negative coverage, and the difficulties and successes of their child protection work were rarely discussed. Instead of reporting the CSA in 1991 was about cases and intervention and rarely about the underlying causes of abuse, how to prevent it or the help that is, or should be available to survivors'. (Skidmore,1995). Child abuse is linked to domestic violence in general, and according to Clarke (1997) 'the New Right has tended to argue that abuses against women and children are symptomatic of the current crisis in the family caused by a decline in morality and family values in this century ; others however believe that rather than any absolute increase in family violence we are witnessing a classic 'moral panic', an upsurge of public and expert attention towards a phenomenon which for many years had been neglected.' This debate ahs been brought up to date with the call for the names and addresses of convicted paedophiles to be made public after their release from prison. Linked to the fears of organised child sexual abuse was concern about the ritual 'Satanic' abuse of children forms part of devil worship. In the 1980s the belief began to take hold that many hundreds or even thousands of children were at risk of being sexually assaulted or even murdered by satanic worshippers. This was the subject of much heart searching in Britain by media professionals, social workers and sociologists. 'Survivor stories were printed in the press and chat show hosts interviewed several people who claimed that they had been victims of satanic cults. What was particularly interesting to sociologists is why such stories should have been believed in the first place, given that stories were so unlike 'real life', involving as they did the devil and his followers. An enquiry into the alleged cases was undertaken by Professor Jean La Fontaine (1994) and no evidence was produced that ritual satanic abuse had ever taken place. When the moral panic subsided it was discovered that the whole episode has started as a result of a training programme for social workers by some American Christian fundamentalists. Another example is the case of single-parent family. 'Our greatest fear and most urgent need is to guard against the possibility of the viewing family becoming a reflection of the families it views' (Kershaw, 1980). Kershaw speaking at the UK Association conference for International Year of the Child 1980,was voicing the fears of many moral entrepreneurs of the time. Indeed his statement might be taken as the rallying call of what was soon to become familiar as the 'New Right' movement of the Thatcher era. The concern abut inadequate families focused upon the lower working class, especially upon single parent house holds. Contemporary social-ills were blamed on the fecklessness of the one-parent family, which became part of the demonology of the new right, supported in part by some sociologists (Dennis, 1992) who although professing 'ethical socialism', actually adopted the agenda of the Tory politicians and began to research the phenomenon of the dysfunctional single parent family. It is this single parent family that has given rise to both political and media concern in the recent past and formed a significant factor in the 'Back to Basics' morality drive of the Conservatives in 1993-4. The response by the media to this political critique was not a homogeneous one an many different voices were heard. The quality broadsheets were concerned with factual evidence surrounding lone parents, especially the accusation that the children - the sons in particular- of lone mothers were more likely to become delinquent. So the single parent, usually young and working class, preferably housed in council accommodation, became another folk-devil. Another case is that of the drug panic of the late 1980s. The important feature of this panic was its unexpectedness, coming as it did after the relatively liberal attitude towards illegal soft drug that prevailed throughout the 1970s. Drug abuse did not appear on the opinion polls between 1979 and 1984, but in 1986 it was called the nation's 'number one problem'. Was the drug crisis a moral panic Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1984, p.222) give this a 'qualified yes', but there is no evidence of an increase in measurable chronic use accompanying the increase in public concern. Nonetheless drug abuse became 'the major problem' of US cities until it moved away from centre-stage in the early 1990s. Why there are moral panics Goode and Ben Yehuda (1994) proposes three models that can be used to address these questions. The grassroots model argues that a panic starts when the general public becomes anxious about a specific problem or issue. When this concern is also voiced by the media and politicians they are simply expressing the more widespread concern. This model rejects the idea that politicians and the media generate the panic, because they cannot create a concern where none has existed before. One example of grassroots concern relates to the increased distribution of heroin and crack cocaine in the USA in the late 1980s. The elite-engineered model says that the elites deliberately and consciously undertake a campaign to create public fear and panic in order to divert attention away from the 'real problems' in society. The mugging panic of the 1970s can be fitted into thi model as Hall et.al.(1978) argue, that the reaction of the crimes was out of all proportion to the actual threat posed by the crimes. Mugging was a perceived or symbolic threat rather than an actual one. The moral panic was arguably a diversionary tactic as capitalism was facing several crises. The interest group theory opposes the elite-engineered model because it challenges the idea that elites are involved at all. This approach considers that the power exercised to produce the moral panic comes from the middle-level groups such as professional associations, police departments, media professionals and religious and educational group. It was argued that in 1968 in the USA, politicians helped to stir up the panic about drug abuse in order to be re-elected. This was not a conspiracy, but rather a situation where the politicians actually believed there was a drugs crisis. References 1. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. London: McGibbon and Kee. 2. Critcher, C. (2003) Moral panics and the media. Buckingham: Open University Press 3. Goode, E., and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: The social construction of deviance. Oxford: Blackwell. 4. Welch, M., Price, E., and Yankey, N (2002) Moral panic over youth violence: Wilding and the manufacture of menace in the media. Youth & Society, Vol. 34, No. 1: 3-30. 5. Young, J (1971). The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy: Some consequences of our present system of drug control as seen in Notting Hill, in Stanley Cohen (ed.), Images of deviance. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 27-61. 6. Cavanagh, A. (2007) Taxonomies of anxiety: risks, panics, paedophilia and the Internet in Electronic Journal of Sociology Read More