1. Stanley Cohen
In the latest of her articles on influential media theorists, Lucy Scott-Galloway introduces
Stanley Cohen, the man who coined the term, and defined the concept of moral panic. She
explores his theory through media representations of teenagers.
Essentials
Stanley Cohen is a contemporary theorist and Professor of Sociology at London School of
Economics. Exploring the impact of the mass media on human social behaviour, more specifically
crime and deviancy, he is most famed for his creation of the term moral panic in his original 1972
book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: Creation of Mods and Rockers. The book has had such an
influence in the study of media effects that it has had several new editions, the most recent in a 2002
30th anniversary edition offering a new introduction ‘Moral Panics as Cultural Politics’. Of greatest use
to the study of media, are his associated concepts of moral panics, folk devils and the deviancy
amplification spiral.
Research interests
Crime and Deviance; social control; prisons; mass media; political prisoners; human rights violations;
atrocities and suffering.
Folk devils
Folk devils are the building blocks of a moral panic. They are the people who are represented by the
media as outsiders, challenging dominant ideology with their ‘deviant’ behaviour, and are blamed for
crimes or other sorts of social problems.
Moral panic
Cohen then identified the role of the media in reporting an isolated event or group of similar incidents,
generating (sometimes unfounded) public anxiety and in some cases hysteria that a group (generally
a minority or subculture) may pose a threat to law and order or public health.
By representing the minority group or subculture as narrative antagonists, the media are intending to
reinforce conformity to (their own) dominant social values.
However, members of the minority group or subculture may make an oppositional reading and use
these representations to further define their collective identity and therefore strengthen their perceived
‘deviant’ behaviour.
Deviancy amplification spiral
The deviancy amplification spiral refers to the way in which the media report on events eads to a
moral panic. For example, a story may appear about some ‘deviant’ act – either illegal or something
considered morally wrong by the dominant ideology. Whilst this event may be ‘newsworthy’ by
common standards, news values – the criteria by which news media select and allocate prominence
to their stories – generally include ‘continuity’; stories that are already in the news. Previously
unreported stories or those that would not previously have been considered newsworthy then achieve
publication or broadcast, as they confirm the pattern, and the moral panic gathers pace. Any contrary
stories or statistics challenging the perceived trend are ignored.
How it works
Early in the morning on a rainy day in March, my students filed obediently into class and sat in their
places. Out came paper and pens and they waited for the lesson to start. One student, a bright and
articulate girl, was a little more reserved than usual, looking glum, and hadn’t taken her hood down
from where it had been shielding her head from the rain. I smiled at her and made a joke comment
about her sporting the very latest in ‘ASBO-chic’. There ensued a long and quite heated class debate
about hoodies, media representations and teenage identities.
In the past year or so, have you ever stood on or walked down a street, perhaps with a few of your
friends, perhaps even – God forbid – wearing a hoodie? On those occasions, have you ever been met
by suspicious glares, disapproving glances or even had passers-by cross the road so that they don’t
walk too near you? Unfortunately, these experiences are so common now for some teenagers, they

2. don’t even notice. Semiotically, the public are reading signs – such as your age and clothes – as
indexes of behaviour, and victims of the latest ‘moral panic’, teenagers are now stereotyped into
hood-wearing, knife-wielding social deviants who can’t distinguish between right and wrong.
If this experience is familiar to you, consider why people might perceive you in this way. According to
the Uses and Gratifications model of audience effects, people use the media to find out about the
world around them, in many cases things, people or places that they have no first-hand knowledge of.
In these cases, media representations become all they know.
Now think about the representations you see of teenagers in the media – especially the news media
which people perceive to be factual. Following the highly publicised ban of customers wearing
hoodies at Bluewater Shopping Centre in May 2005, dozens of headlines flooded the news media –
especially the sensationalist tabloids – blaming hoodie-wearing youths for social problems.
Hoodie ban pays off for shopping centre (The Daily Mail, 10.05.05)
Hoodie kills WPC (The Sun, 13.05.06)
500,000 Kids in Hoodie Gangs (The Sun, 26.05.06)
In reality, the news reporting on a relatively small and logical event – a shopping centre banning
baseball hats and hoodies so that CCTV cameras could always get a clear picture of faces – caused
a trend in news reporting and cultivated a social phenomenon.
1. Young people began to be defined by their clothing, to the extent that the ‘hoodie’ became
representative of the person in The Sun’s absurd headline above, ‘Hoodie kills WPC’.
2. Previously neutral words, such as ‘hoodie’ and ‘youth’ become loaded with negative connotations
by their frequent use in reports on the moral panic.
3. In fictional texts, the hoodie can become an item of costume that is a shorthand code to
character – an undesirable one!
4. Young people themselves, wanting to be different from the conformity of adulthood and to buy
into the ‘cool’ of resisting authority, wore their hoodies with pride, leaving Joe and Jane Bloggs on the
street suddenly seeing hoards of youngsters in hooded tops, convinced they’re about to get mugged.
Discussion point
– If we hadn’t had CCTV to record shoppers in public spaces, which intensified the need to see
faces, would the hoodie phenomenon have gathered the pace it did?
Activity
– Get a newspaper or range of newspapers for a particular day or week.
– Make a note of any stories which include teenagers.
– For each story, identify whether the teenagers are represented as protagonists, antagonists or
victims.
– Lastly, identify any words or phrases that are being loaded with negative connotations.
Quotable Quote
‘I think the bad press that went with hoodies was blown out of all proportion.’ Ritchie Cunningham, the
headmaster of Inverness High, where the hoodie has been adopted as part of the school uniform.
Glossary
ASBO: Anti-Social Behaviour Order, first used in 1999.
News Values: The criteria used to decide which stories are given coverage and prominence.
Oppositional reading:A meaning made of a text by a person whose social position puts them in direct
conflict with the preferred, or intended meaning.
Sensationalism: A trend of some media to present stories in a controversial, over-exaggerated
manner.
Social deviant: Behaviour which differs from the norm or from the accepted standards of a society.
Uses and Gratifications: A media effects approach that considers the audience active in making
meaning of texts, based on their uses of the media to meet their own different needs.

3. Worth a visit to the library...
Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen
Cohen’s original account of media coverage of Mods and Rockers in the 1960s as a moral panic case
study. The new introduction tracks moral panics in the thirty years since the book’s original
publication, including asylum seekers and paedophiles.
Moral Panics, Kenneth Thompson
Thompson uses a number of contemporary case studies to explore the nature the moral panic in the
British media. Studies include Moral Panics about youth and clubbing, sex and AIDS, violence and girl
gangs and sex on TV, as well as an account of the original moral panic about Mods and Rockers.
Wider contexts
Working towards your A2 media? Then you will come across the wider contexts – the social,
historical, political and economic contexts. These provide valuable background for your interpretation
of media texts. The idea of dumbing down can be a useful starting point for exploring some of these
wider contexts in a general way, before applying them more specifically to texts like celebrity
magazines or Big Brother.
Lucy Scott-Galloway teaches Media and Communication Studies at Havering College.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 18.
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