Moral Panics and Community Sensitisation

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).
 

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