Abstract
What triggers and feeds fear in society? That is the challenging question addressed in Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media, and, as the title suggests, the media are often the culprit. Here, Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley have edited a worthy collection of essays that define and illustrate the useful theoretical construct of moral panic, a term first coined in the 1970s by Stanley Cohen, who noted, “Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panics. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. . . .” His idea grew out of the explosion of cultural studies work of the late 1960s and 1970s, especially as ideas about power and its relationship to language and discourse came to dominate a great part of the debate. Of course, these social fears inflamed by the media often result in public calls for social elites to take action that, as O’Malley noted, “reflects a ‘fundamentally inappropriate’ response to a perceived threat.” What sets this particular collection apart from contemporary applications of theory is its emphasis on past media behavior and how it effected social change, revealing that (news) media can be placed “firmly at the centre of historical accounts” of social change and can be directed in certain ways.
The book’s three parts and thirteen chapters neatly delineate theoretical definitions from their application. The book’s first part provides ample explanation about what constitutes a moral panic and its various transformations since Cohen’s first articulation. Chas Critcher, a preeminent scholar in this area, stresses that Cohen’s model and all subsequent variations are hardy and useful for studying media and media behavior over time and across national borders. However, as the editors warn, the blanket application of any moral panic model must be thoughtfully executed because the relationship among “the media, moral panics and social fears” is far too complex to apply whenever social fears manifest themselves. The second part explores the media as the object of the panic, and the final chapters concern media promotion of social fears.
The chapters concerning new media technologies as objects of fear serve to remind, as Gabriele Balbi, observed, “This capacity to scare has characterized the advent of all media and also (and above all) the so-called new media.” While Balbi’s work focused on the introduction of the telephone in Italy, another chapter examined the cinema as an object of fear, especially when its content expressed ideas that a dominant group found threatening. In this case, British colonial masters feared that the cinema would impart wrong ideas to loyal subjects about their place in the empire and “foster Americanization” or encourage the natives to challenge their imperial occupiers.
Of interest to this media historian, however, is Part III’s research that involved the media’s role in igniting and sustaining moral panics. The topics ranged from the rash of unwed mothers following the First World War to youth violence prompted by the release of A Clockwork Orange. Fears about the dilution of a dominant culture became the focus in one chapter that reflected growing post–World War II British anxiety about Americans. “The wartime influx of American servicemen had exacerbated long-standing concerns about the ‘Americanisation’ of British culture,” the researcher noted. These concerns abetted by newspaper accounts sparked a moral panic after a young British girl joined the crime spree of an American G.I. on the run after deserting. As the British media viewed it, the young woman, Elizabeth Jones, was a victim of “aggressive American culture” and was led astray.
Still, one significant criticism of the collection can be levied at the editors, and that is the too heavy emphasis on British case studies. Even so, all of the works presented here are useful, and media scholars would do well to pay attention to them. For American scholars, especially, one chapter that examined how the media (newspapers) stoked public fears of harsh police tactics should resonate, given recent events in places like Ferguson, Missouri, or Staten Island, New York.
At the book’s outset, the editors write that one of the book’s primary objectives was to illustrate how the concept of a moral panic can be useful in considering the “relationship between the media and social change” and how the media can act as a stimulant, a way of thinking about social fears and the panics that may arise from them, and can serve as a way of placing the media firmly at the centre of historical accounts of social change.
In most respects, these essays succeed, and the contributors to this volume make compelling cases for the concept and its application in historical media studies.