Moral Panics

Over the years, the media to some has become a primary source to blame for many of the moral panics seen on the news throughout the past couple of years, and in this week’s lecture and seminar we took a look at how this could actually be true or not.

News articles are a prime example of this as over the years people have used news articles as a primary and trustworthy source of discovering what has been happening locally and over the world.  However sometimes media outlets can sometimes exaggerate on some stories, sometimes in order to create more publicity therefore more readers. A more modern example of this is the news outlets portrayal of video games, sometimes using video games as an easy way out for journalists to use and manipulating parents into thinking that video games are the cause for a lot of violent acts that have occurred. A more recent example is the 2012 ‘Sandy Hook Shooting’ where many journalists would blame video games as the primary cause of the shooting, even other instances of mass murder the media has used video games as a prime suspect behind it all including the 2012 Aurora shooting where journalists claimed the shooter was an avid player of video games before the shooting occurred. However it has later been revealed that there was no indication that video games would be the influence behind the shooting. While it could be argued that video games such as ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto’ can be seen as suspects in violent real life acts, but that is why products like that have a rating system, similar to the film industry giving people more of an idea of what themes are actually in the games. Interestingly it’s even been researched since video games as a whole has no negative effect on the brain, “during the years in which video games soared in popularity, youth violence has declined to 40-year lows. And while it’s natural, in such an emotional time, for people to search desperately for answers, that often results in misinformation.”[1]

This unfortunate trend has been a consistent theme from the media for decades across all forms of media, from music, films and comic books this exploitation is seen as a way to make people read their headlines and watch their show or read their newspaper without even thinking about the other issues that are seen around these unfortunate events. And one of the worse things about this is teenagers being blamed as the culprits behind these attacks, blatantly giving parents and other adults a primary demographic to blame on as we all know that video games today have a large fan base that consists of teenagers. They have even gone on to be referred to as ‘Folk Devils’ by the likes of Stanley Cohen, “Young delinquents are far from unique in being associated with violence, and no one type of youthful deviant has been constructed entirely like any other, still “these groups have occupied a constant position as folk devils in moral panics”[2]

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[1] Ferguson, C. (2012). Sandy Hook Shooting: Video Games Blamed, Again. Available: http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/20/sandy-hook-shooting-video-games-blamed-again/. Last accessed 10th May 2015.

[2] Krinsky, C (2008). Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth. Northeastern University: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p2.
[3] Image:  https://andyluke.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/ban-these-evil-games.png?w=730
[4}  TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit . (2012). Tragedy and Video Game Violence . [Online Video]. 19 December. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uwAo8lcAC4. [Accessed: 11 May 2015].