Book Review: Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives, edited by Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley
| Autor: | Brian Gabrial |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 92:521-522 |
| ISSN: | 2161-430X 1077-6990 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1077699015580560f |
| Popis: | Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives. Siân Nicholas and Tom O'Malley, eds. New York: Routledge, 2013. 246 pp. $140 hbk.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. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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