Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media

Historical Perspectives

Siân Nicholas, Tom O'Malley, Siân Nicholas, Tom O'Malley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136731617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses. Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination.

The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.

Part I

Approaches to the Media, Moral Panics and Social Fears

1 Model Answers

Moral Panics and Media History

Chas Critcher

The history of mass media is by definition one of innovation. The most striking invention is that of a new medium such as film, radio or television in the twentieth century. The way in which each one is produced and consumed becomes a topic of public debate about its social and cultural implications. A similar pattern may also occur when the medium, such as film, is already well established, but what is new is a genre, such as gangster or horror or pornographic movies.

Whether triggered by a new medium or a new genre, arguments rage about the possible impacts on a wide spectrum of human experience and creativity. A common elite reaction to a new medium is suspicion, sometimes consternation, about its capacity to disrupt cultural and social relations. Concern about the possibility of such effects is expressed by influential commentators, though it may not be widely shared. If, however, a range of factors—the radical nature of the new medium, the cultural influence of its detractors, a well-publicised example of its nefarious impact—should combine, then there is the potential for an orchestrated campaign for action to control the new medium through regulation.

The handiest tool with which to explore such eruptions of concern is that of ‘moral panic’. Initially developed in the early 1970s to analyse social reaction to youth, it was subsequently extended to a wide range of social problems: crime and disorder, immigration and asylum, physical and sexual abuse of children, the consumption of alcohol and drugs.¹ More recently, there have been attempts to identify the general cultural process of which moral panics are an extreme instance. This has produced the concept of ‘moral regulation’ to conceptualise those activities which seek to control social or cultural behaviour on moral grounds.²

The arrival of a new mass medium hardly fits the category of social problem, but it may just be that similar processes operate for quite different types of issues. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the potential of the model of moral panic, and eventually the concept of moral regulation, for the analysis of reaction to new media. The focus will be on the new, mainly electronic, mass media of the twentieth century. Fortunately efforts have already been made to adapt the generic model of moral panic to produce a model of ‘media panic’ which can encompass the specific concerns of media history. The main objective will be to further refine this concept of media panic so that it becomes adequate for the full range of new media appearing in the twentieth century.

It should be made clear at the outset that this chapter is based upon an empirical claim about reactions to new media. These reactions have almost invariably focussed upon children and teenagers as those most likely to be adversely affected. This has been so for all the new media of the twentieth century: for film and radio, television and video, computer games and the internet.³ Others have occasionally been cast in the role of victims. For example, there was some initial concern about the capacity of film to distract women from their allotted social role, just as earlier the same had been alleged of penny dreadfuls and, before that, of the novel. Contemporary echoes persist in debates about the media contributing to eating disorders or premature sexualisation amongst girls. Nevertheless, the moral integrity of children and teenagers, especially boys, became the twentieth-century benchmark against which each and every new medium in turn was judged. Thus, the following discussion seeks to incorporate and account for this persistent theme in panics about new media.

This chapter is divided into five sections. The first outlines Cohen's original model of moral panics and Drotner's adaptation of Cohen's model. The second section examines how far the model fits the examples covered by three major British studies by, respectively, Barker, Smith and Springhall. The third section briefly indicates how American writers on their history of new media improvised models very like those of Cohen and Drotner. The fourth section summarises the revisions of Drotner's model necessary to make it comprehensive and then reformulates her essential propositions. The conclusion briefly indicates why the concept of moral regulation usefully complements that of moral or media panic. The whole discussion inevitably has an Anglo-American bias. Future work on the models should reveal how they may need further amendment to include nations or regions with their own distinctive histories of reactions to new media.

THE MORAL/MEDIA PANIC FRAMEWORK: THE LATEST MODEL

The moral panic framework was first developed by Stanley Cohen in a study of alleged confrontations between the youth subcultures of mods and rockers in the early 1960s. Cohen claimed that this was an example of a systemic tendency in modern societies.

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. (1) A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; (2) its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; (3) the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; (4) socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; (5) ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; (6) the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folk-lore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.⁴

There is much more to Cohen's work than this powerful opening paragraph. He pays meticulous attention to detailed evidence, by no means derived solely from the media. Cohen studied some of the disturbances ethnographically, conducted lengthy interviews with key moral entrepreneurs and held focus groups to gauge audience reactions. The model thus requires careful handling so that its original subtlety is not lost. Because it implies a process, I characterised this as a ‘processual’ model of moral panic in a previous work where I tested it against five case studies (AIDS, ecstasy/raves, video nasties, child abuse and paedophilia).⁵ I concluded that the basic model stood up remarkably well but needed some refinement. This produced a model of eight stages rather than Cohen's six.

I also considered an alternative model of moral panics emerging from sociological debates in the United States. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda's work⁶ I argued to be an ‘attributional’ model of moral panic, defining moral panics by their essential characteristics. Drawing on examples across history and the globe, they specified five attributes of moral panics: (1) widespread concern over a group and its behaviour; (2) universal hostility towards the group; (3) consensus amongst the populace as a whole about the threat; (4) disproportion in the nature of the reaction; and (5) volatility in the rise and fall of the issue. I concluded that this was a less effective model than Cohen's but raised crucial issues about concern and consensus as the basis for moral panic.

Goode and Ben-Yehuda insist that moral panics must have an identifiable folk devil. Cohen is less rigid. They do not appear in his opening paragraph, although they do in the title and throughout the text. I concluded that moral panics can, and indeed have been known to, occur without folk devils. I found that, in the cases of ecstasy and video nasties, the threat came from the object itself rather than human agents. Significantly, folk devils are absent from an adaptation of the generic model of moral panic to the specific case of the history of new media. This is Kirsten Drotner's version of a ‘media panic’.

It may be considered a specification of the wider concept of moral panic, and has some basic characteristics: (1) the media is both instigator and purveyor of discussion; (2) the discussion is highly emotionally charged and morally polarised (the medium is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’) with the negative pole being the most visible in most cases; (3) the discussion is an adult discussion that primarily focuses on children and young people; (4) the proponents often have professional stakes in the subject under discussion, as librarians, cultural critics or academic scholars; (5) the discussion, like a classic narrative, has three phases: a beginning often catapulted by single case, a peak involving some kind of public or professional intervention, and an end (or fading-out phase) denoting a seeming resolution to the perceived problem in question.⁷

This specification of a media panic has aspects of both the processual and attributional models. Items 1–4 are essentially attributes of the media panic. Item 5 is rather different and is much closer to Cohen's processual model.

Drotner cites supporting evidence from two main historical examples—popular literature in the nineteenth century and film in the early twentieth century—with additional references to comics in the 1950s and computers in the 1990s. She detects subtle discursive changes over time. The pessimistic elitism of earlier panics insisted that only regulation through censorship would provide adequate protection. Later comes a paternalistic belief that exposure to quality culture will vanquish mass culture. Most recently, consumerist democracy hopes that in the cultural market place the best value will eventually be recognised.

Such changes are important but outweighed by the continuities, especially in the three underlying assumptions of critics. First is the idea that the cultural dichotomy between high and low culture contains a whole range of other dichotomies: art vs. entertainment; tradition vs. innovation; authenticity vs. imitation; rationalism vs. emotionalism; and critical analysis vs. uncritical endorsement. Second is the belief that the media have direct and immediate impacts upon their audience, either behavioural or psychological. Third is the proposition that children are the most vulnerable segment of the audience so that new media pose a particular threat to their normal processes of development. The cycle recurs. ‘Every new panic develops as if it was the first time that such issues were debated in public, and yet the debates are strikingly similar’.⁸

Finally, Drotner considers four possible explanations for this recurrent cycle of media panics. The first is an inherent contradiction in the project of modernity, to sanction individual choice but value uniform behaviour. Cultural order is therefore tenuous. Second is tension between generations. New media always attract the young, threatening the cultural competence of adults. Third is class conflict over culture. Most anxious are cultural guardians: librarians, teachers, intellectuals. ‘Media panics, then, can be understood as tacit or explicit means of social regulation’.⁹ Fourth are psychoanalytic factors revealed by the terms and images of the anti-media discourse. Adults arguing their right to protect children are actually lamenting their own loss of childhood.

Theoretical explanations apart, we have established the sophistication of both the moral and the media panic models. It is essential to appreciate, as Drotner acknowledges, that her model of media panic provides ‘a longer, historical perspective on the moral panics or media panics’ which inevitably ...