Judging Moral Panic

The multiple mass media genre (Neale 2001)available to us today has cause information to travel in a blink of an eye. Notices and warnings may travel through the internet, radio as well as television. However, as good as this is, the media may instead of educating and warning, it may also cause unnecessary panic.

Moral panic was first define by Stanley Cohan in his work “Folk devils and moral panic” (1987) (Burns, 2000). In his book, he has defined moral panic as a an episode which causes society to worry about moral principles which the society upholds may be in jeopardy (Cohen 1987).

Today, we see all kinds of moral panic running loose such as media causing violence and personal information being gathered and traded. Although this kind of information may promote benefits and awareness among us, it may lead to unnecessary violence.

One of the earliest moral panic ever recorded was the resulted clash between the mods and rockers during the 1960’s. And today, we might be seeing the same thing happening in Malaysia

A famous Malaysian blogger named Raja Petra was sent to jail for posting an article titled “Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell”. Although the main stream media in Malaysia tried to stay as neutral as possible, there are other genres which have no gatekeepers whatsoever.

I am of course talking about the internet. Moreover, many on the internet has voiced out their disapproval of jailing bloggers voicing out their discontent with the government. And even though it finally died down after a few days, the trust in the government is piling up.

That is because there are numerous case in which the government failed to proof them self worthy of the people and ignoring the each waves of moral panic as if the public will forget about them. A very good example would be the Altantuya case in which we have failed to hear anything from it till today.

Therefore, being educated citizens such as we are, it is important to be yet again aware of information we consume and process them accordingly. Never judge an information directly, one must first view it from different angles before coming to a conclusion about an event.

Cohen, S. 1987, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers London: MacGibbon and Kee

Burns, H 2000, 'What are ‘moral panics’?, http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/hrb9701.html, viewed October 3rd 2007

Neale, S & Turner, G 2001, 'Introduction: what is genre'. In G. Creeber, G, Miller, T & Tulloch, J (eds.), Television genre book (pp. 1-7, chapter 1)