| „They labelled it – borrowing a description proffered by a police officer – ‘a mugging gone wrong’. Thus the word ‘mugging’, hitherto used almost exclusively in an American context, or to refer in very general terms to the general growth of crime in Britain, was affixed to a particular case, and entered the crime reporter’s vocabulary. Some reporters seemed to think the ‘new’ word also heralded the coming of a new crime.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 7) Es geht um (die Zuschreibung von) Gewaltverbrechen. Nicht um Pizza. |
| „‘As Crimes of Violence Escalate, a Word Common In The United States Enters the British Headlines: Mugging. To our Police, it’s a frightening new strain of crime.’“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 7) ...es ist böse und kommt von aussen... |
| „The Cornhill Magazine stated, in 1863, in terms which could have been transposed, without a single change, to 1972: ‘Once more the streets of London are unsafe by day or night. The public dread has almost become a panic’. The outbreak in London was followed by reports of similar events in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottingham, Chester: ‘Credulity became a social obligation’ as ‘the garrotters, lurking in the shadow of the wall, quickening step behind one on the lonely footpath, became something like a national bogey ... Men of coarse appearance but blameless intentions were attacked ... under suspicion of being garrotters.’Anti-garrotting societies flourished. Then the reaction began. More people were hanged in 1863 ‘than in any year since the end of the bloody code’“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 8) |
| „The fact is that it is extremely difficult to discover exactly what was new in ‘mugging’ – except the label itself.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 10) gibt es eine parallele dieser behaupteten neuhet? fraglich. oft geht es um soziale interventionen. oft wird dabei einmehr oder weniger verunglücktes Beispiel einer solchen Interention herangezogen und skandalisiert. vgl hierzu https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/machtverhaeltnisse-statt-mythen-fuer-ein-emanzipatorisches-verstaendnis-von-wissenschaftsfreiheit/print/ |
| „When the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when ‘experts’, in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress ‘sudden and dramatic’ increases (in numbers involved or events) and ‘novelty’, above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 20) |
| „A moral panic has been defined as follows by Stan Cohen in his study of the ‘mods and rockers’, Folk Devils and Moral Panic: Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic is passed over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way society conceives itself.52“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 20) |
| „In short ‘mugging’ had consequences in the real world, quite apart from the number of people mugged on the streets; and these consequences appear to have less to do with what actually was known to be happening, than with the character, scale and intensity of this reaction.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 21) das lässt sich übertragen.. |
| „the scale and intensity of this reaction is quite at odds with the scale of the threat to which it was a response. Thus there is strong evidence of a ‘moral panic’ about mugging.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 21) |
| „The ‘mugging’ label played a key role in the development of the moral panic about ‘mugging’ and the United States effectively provided both the label itself and its field of associations and references, which lent meaning and substance to the term. The mass media here was the key apparatus which formed the link and framed the passage of the term from one context to the other. This is no simple coupling. First, there is the whole American experience of ‘mugging’; then there is the way an already fully elaborated and troubling theme in the United States is picked up and represented in the British press. This representation familiarises the British audience not only with the term but also with what it has come to mean, to signify, to stand for in the American context. ‘Mugging’ comes to Britain first as an American phenomenon, but fully thematised and contextualised. It is embedded in a number of linked frames: the race conflict; the urban crisis; rising crime; the breakdown of ‘law and order’; the liberal conspiracy; the white blacklash. It is no mere fact about crime in the United States which is reported. It connotes a whole historical construction about the nature and dilemmas of American society. The British media pick up American ‘mugging’ within this cluster of connotative references. The term is indexical: simply by using the label, a whole social history of the contemporary United States can be immediately and graphically mapped into place. Then the label is appropriated and applied to the British situation.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 30) sic! |
| „When such discrepancies appear between threat and reaction, between what is perceived and what that is a perception of, we have good evidence to suggest we are in the presence of an ideological displacement. We call this displacement a moral panic.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 32) |
| „In this scheme of things, the silent majority, common sense and conservative moral attitudes are one and the same, or mutually interchangeable. So the reference to ‘common sense’ as a final moral appeal also contracts quite complex affiliations with this larger debate. In this convergence, common sense is irrevocably harnessed to a traditionalist perspective on society, morality and the preservation of social order. The appeal to common sense thus forms the basis for the construction of traditionalist coalitions and alliances devoted to stoking up and giving public expression to moral indignation and rage.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 163) |
| „What has been vital to this ‘revivalist’ movement in traditionalist ideology is its ability to use that thematic structure of ‘Englishness’ which we discussed earlier, to connect with and draw out the otherwise unarticulated anxieties and sense of unease of those sections of the working class who have felt ‘the earth move under their feet’. And it is the potency of those themes and images (work, discipline, the family, and so on), rather than any detailed specification of their content, which has made those connections possible.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 163) |
| „Moral panics come into play when this deep-structure of anxiety and traditionalism connects with the public definition of crime by the media, and is mobilised.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 163) |
| „And part of our intention is certainly to situate the ‘moral panic’ as one of the forms of appearance of a more deep-seated historical crisis, and thereby to give it greater historical and theoretical specificity. This relocation of the concept on a different and deeper level of analysis does not, however, lead us to abandon it altogether as useless. Rather, it helps us to identify the ‘moral panic’ as one of the principal surface manifestations of the crisis, and in part to explain how and why the crisis came to be experienced in that form of consciousness, and what the displacement of a conjunctural crisis into the popular form of a ‘moral panic’ accomplishes, in terms of the way the crisis is managed and contained.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 218) |
| „One of the effects of retaining the notion of ‘moral panic’ is the penetration it provides into the otherwise extremely obscure means by which the working classes are drawn in to processes which are occurring in large measure ‘behind their backs’, and led to experience and respond to contradictory developments in ways which make the operation of state power legitimate, credible and consensual. To put it crudely, the ‘moral panic’ appears to us to be one of the principal forms of ideological consciousness by means of which a ‘silent majority’ is won over to the support of increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a ‘more than usual’ exercise of control.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 218) sic! |
| „In what we think of as the middle period, in the later 1960s, these panics follow faster on the heels of one another than earlier; and an increasingly amplified general ‘threat to society’ is imputed to them (drugs, hippies, the underground, pornography, long-haired students, layabouts, vandalism, football hooliganism). In many instances the sequence is so speeded up that it bypasses the“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 218) |
| „moment of local impact; there was no upsurge of grass-roots pressure required to bring the drugs squad crunching in on cannabis smokers. Both the media and the ‘control culture’ seem more alerted to their occurrence – the media quickly pick up the symptomatic event and the police and courts react quickly without considerable moral pressure from below.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 219) ist das jetzt auch do eine oeriode? |
| „This coalescence into a concerted campaign marks a significant shift in the panic process, for the tendency to panic is now lodged at the heart of the state’s political complex itself, and from that vantage-point, all dissensual breaks in the society can be more effectively designated as a ‘general threat to law and order itself’, and thus as subverting the general interest (which the state represents and protects). Panics now tend to operate from top to bottom.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 219) late period: mp ist als regierungstool top downnach belieben aufrufbar. |
| #control-culture |
| „(1) Discrete moral panics (early 1960s, e.g. ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’) Dramatic event Æ public disquiet, moral entrepreneurs (sensitisation) Æ control culture action (2) ‘Crusading’– mapping together discrete moral panics to produce a ‘speeded-up’ sequence (late 1960s, e.g. pornography and drugs) Sensitisation (moral entrepreneurship) Æ dramatic event Æ control culture action (3) Post-‘law-and-order’ campaign: an altered sequence (post-1970 e.g. mugging) Sensitisation Æ control culture organisation and action (invisible) Æ dramatic event Æ control culture intensified action (visible)“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 219) |
| „It first precipitated with respect to ‘youth’, which came to provide, for a time, a metaphor for social change and an index of social anxiety.22 Every troubling feature of post-war social change was refracted in its highly visible prism. In youth, social change was not simply projected, but magnified. Inheritors of the Welfare State, harbingers of the post-war world, ‘youth’ was, at once, the vanguard of the Golden Age, and the vanguard party of the new materialism, the new hedonism. All of social change was inscribed, in microcosm, in its innocent face. The public response was, predictably, ambivalent. That ambivalence is registered in the ‘moral panic’ about the Teddy Boys in the mid-1950s,23 where the public gave vent to its collective horror at the spectacle of youth of the white under-class, with its rising social ambitions and its expressive violence, dressed up in off-the-peg, lumpenised versions of an Edwardian style, jiving to what Paul Johnson once described as ‘jungle music’, floating out of its proper habitat ‘up town’, spilling over into the respectable enclaves, dance halls and cinemas, and occasionally running amok to the beat of Rock Around The Clock. 24 The link with violence provided the frisson on which moral panics feeds. A few years later, the remnants of the Teds found their way into the streets of Notting Hill in the first full-scale race riots ever seen in Britain. The Times editorial (‘Hooliganism is Hooliganism’) made the straight transposition from hooliganism and ‘teenage violence’ into lawlessness and anarchy. The growth of racism was neglected; but the existence of blacks as a ‘problem’ was tacitly acknowledged.25“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 231) |
| „Let us guard, once again, against a conspiratorial reading of this process. Society is massively more polarised, in every part and feature, in the 1970s than it was in the 1950s. Conflicts, repressed and displaced at an earlier point in time, emerge into the open, and divide the nation. The ‘crisis’ is not a crisis, alone, in the heads of ruling-class conspirators; it is the form assumed by the class struggle in this period. What are important, however, are the distortions and inflections which are endemic to the ways in which this crisis, and the forces of resistance and opposition ranged against it, are ideologically perceived and signposted by those in power,“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 315) #ideology |
| „Ideology is an inflection or misrepresentation of real relations, a displacement of the class struggle, not myths conjured up out of fairy stories. The ‘ideology of the crisis’, which leads to and supports and finally finds its fulfilment in a ‘law-and-order’ society, refers to a real crisis, not to a phoney one.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 315) |
| „Crucially, in the early years of our period, it is sustained by what we call a displacement effect: the connection between the crisis and the way it is appropriated in the social experience of the majority – social anxiety – passes through a series of false ‘resolutions’, primarily taking the shape of a succession of moral panics. It is as if each surge of social anxiety finds a temporary respite in the projection of fears on to and into certain compellingly anxiety-laden themes:“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 315) |
| „The first phenomenal form which the ‘experience of social crisis’ assumes in public consciousness, then, is the moral panic. The second stage is where particular moral panics converge and overlap: where the enemy becomes both many-faceted and ‘one’; where the sale of drugs, the spread of pornography, the growth of the women’s movement and the critique of the family are experienced and signified as the thin edges of that larger wedge: the threat to the state, the breakdown of social life itself, the coming of chaos, the onset of anarchy. Now the demons proliferate – but, more menacingly, they belong to the same subversive family. They are ‘brothers under the skin’; they are ‘part and parcel of the same thing’. This looks, on the surface, like a more concrete set of fears, because here social anxiety can cite a specific enemy, name names. But, in fact, this naming of names is deceptive. For the enemy is lurking everywhere. He (or, increasingly, she) is ‘behind everything’. This is the point where the crisis appears in its most abstract form: as a ‘general conspiracy’. It is ‘the crisis’ – but in the disguise of Armageddon. This is where the cycle of moral panics issues directly into a law-and-order society. For if the threat to society ‘from below’ is at the same time the subversion of the state from within, then only a general exercise of authority and discipline, only a very wide-ranging brief to the state to ‘set things to right’ – if necessary at the temporary expense of certain of those liberties which, in more relaxed times, we all enjoyed – is likely to succeed.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 316) |
| „This looks, on the surface, like a more concrete set of fears, because here social anxiety can cite a specific enemy, name names. But, in fact, this naming of names is deceptive. For the enemy is lurking everywhere. He (or, increasingly, she) is ‘behind everything’. This is the point where the crisis appears in its most abstract form: as a ‘general conspiracy’. It is ‘the crisis’ – but in the disguise of Armageddon.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 316) |
| „By 1976, the date our story ended, robbery statistics (most of which were regarded as muggings) and youth unemployment were rising in tandem, black youth and mugging had become synonymous, the police were aggressively swamping ‘black’ areas using local stop and search powers and the old ‘sus’ laws largely against young black males, and an emboldened National Front had marched specifically against black muggings. The advent of Thatcher and Thatcherism worsened matters considerably during the eighties. Her authoritarian, cost-cutting, neo-liberal agenda was to produce fierce industrial disputes, wholesale deindustrialisation, growing inequality, mass (especially youth) unemployment, growing anti-immigrant feeling, and regular inner city riots: in Bristol, Brixton, Toxteth, Tottenham, Handsworth and elsewhere. Scarman’s conclusion that the Brixton riots were ‘essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police’1 was broadly true of all of them. In Brixton 1981 it was a mass stop/search operation over 10 days that was the immediate trigger. In Tottenham 1985 it was the rough handling of a black woman in a drug raid, precipitating a fatal heart attack. The Metropolitan Police’s response to Scarman was to release figures showing black people were largely responsible for muggings in London and to introduce the idea of targeting ‘symbolic locations’ – places where unemployed (often black) youth congregate (read: ‘black areas’).“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 390) #polizeikontrollen |
| „Moral panics are perceived crises in the moral order, reinforcing the tendency of elites to embrace a single definition of the problem and the media to reproduce it. However, the defining elites can vary. With child abuse, for example, the dominant definition emerged from alliances between the social work profession, child saving organisations and government ministers. The police were key definers of street crime, paedophilia and rave/ecstasy, usually having to work hard to secure the support of politicians and the press. Some issues that become moral panics, such as immigration and asylum, embarrass governments. There the primary definition is more likely to come from some combination of press, opposition politicians and campaigning groups. On any issue the press may itself take the role of primary definer. Nevertheless, the primary definers of deviance are most likely to be those in authority to whom the media will normally defer, especially at times of perceived crisis.19“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 393) |
| „defer,“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 393) delay |
| „A defining characteristic of moral panics is that contributors are required to accept the dominant definition of the problem or risk being regarded as apologists for evil.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 393) |
| „Our third aspect is how the public are invoked in moral panics. We focussed on how news media translated official discourse into popular argot (the ‘public idiom’), then assumed the mantle of speaking on behalf of the public (‘taking the public voice’). Thus the media do not represent public opinion; they construct and orchestrate it, assuming the mantle of common sense. This line of enquiry seems to have been little developed. An exception is Brookes et al. who examined the construction of public opinion on terrestrial TV news in the 2001 election.26 Though forbidden to editorialise, journalists nevertheless sought to construct public opinion by a selective use of opinion polls, arbitrary vox pops and their own unsubstantiated assertions about the public mood: ‘the representation of public opinion produced through the media has important ideological consequences’.27“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 394) |
| „McRobbie and Thornton famously argued that such new forms of media and politics required reform of the old moral panic model,33 but nothing has emerged to replace it. It can be argued that alterations in the news mediascape have had limited impact upon the course of moral panics. Such may be the lesson of two very different recent examples: the prohibition of new designer drug mephedrone34 and the social reaction to the inner city riots.35 Social media were in both cases used by deviant actors to share their world-views, but, once in public view, condemnation and retribution were unequivocal. The centralised systems of media, social control agencies and government still retain an extraordinary cultural power, despite lacking influence in cyberspace. New media clearly need to be incorporated into moral panic media analysis but should not dominate it. Three other projects may be equally productive. One is the need for continued empirical work using analytical techniques developed since PTC. Recent work on the asylum seekers panic is exemplary.36 Two, the genres through which moral panics operate might profitably be analysed in terms of narrative structure.37 Three, connections might be made with work on risk, notably the role of the media in its social amplification.38 Then, just as PTC once did, moral panic analysis can benefit from and contribute to the field of media studies as a whole.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 395) |
| „Outside of The Times and the Morning Star, a common pattern of feature treatment emerged. Essential background elements – universally those of victim, mugger and area – were selected, individually explored, and set against each other. It is the specific journalistic feature form which provides the mechanism of balance; the final weighing is not arrived at by a process of argument or analysis but is built into the feature form as it is initially constructed. Thus one strategy used by more than one newspaper was to juxtapose (either within the same feature article or in the same paper in a ‘feature spread’) a number of ways of interpreting the connection between crime and environment, biography and background. This way of balancing off a number of different readings is a sort of feature by montage effect and was most obvious in the case of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. In the Express the ‘balance’ was set out on the double-page – on the left Handsworth and the mugger, on the right the suffering victim, the liberal judge unusually incensed, and a highly flattering portrait of the local police (pre-empting more critical versions of police policy towards immigrant groups such as those appearing in the Star and the Guardian). Although the whole feature had a severely deterministic headline –‘Caught for Life in a Violent Trap’ – we have seen how the Handsworth/mugger side of the equation had been so undermined by particular images of the race–crime connection that the overall effect was to cut away the grounds of the argument it otherwise contained. Balance here was represented typographically but the ideological weight was tilted to one side.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 105) #Montage |
| „The feature by montage conveyed an impression of comprehensiveness (covering all points of view) as well as of balance: ‘hard-line’ councillors or policemen against ‘soft-centred’ community workers; local residents against figures of authority; or (as in the Birmingham Evening Mail’s version) mothers of the accused against anxious mothers in the street. Formally, the issue was left unresolved: evidence was not ignored, but these elements were simply left contradicting each other. It would have been possible for this variety and contradictoriness to be tolerated by the paper (reserving its own judgement for the editorial); in practice, the montage was so selected and shaped that a ‘resolution’ on one side or other of the ideological paradigm did appear to emerge of its own accord.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 106) #montage |
| „An alternative feature strategy was to try to distil the essence or the problematic core of the problem by finding all the general themes condensed into a local instance. This was the feature by microcosm effect. Here the general issue of crime/ poverty/violence was perceived and portrayed through the particular story – for example, of Handsworth. This was most evident in the local papers (as we shall see). In the nationals, it was principally at work in the Guardian. That paper physically – and thus ideologically – separated out the elements of its feature exploration. The interview with the victim and extended protests from pressure groups provided the material of the front-page, follow-up story, but consideration of Paul Storey’s biography and the social environment of Handsworth were reserved for the ‘background problem’ on the features page. This separation – while something of a break with otherwise dominant feature news values – also represented a kind of equivocation. For by going ‘behind’ the immediate issue of liberal penologists versus law-and-order adherents, the Guardian also displaced the problem so that there appeared no relationship between the sentences and policies towards deprivation. The Guardian, unable to confront the ‘moral panic’ to which it had itself contributed through conventional news coverage, sought the safer ground of social policy. Hence the Guardian provided less of an effort to balance competing interests around the case than to balance competing interests within the area: not victim versus mugger but local residents versus those in authority. The sharpness of these conflicts of interest were noted, yet there was no attempt to choose between them any more than the paper could produce an editorial coming down on one side or the other of the controversy over the sentence.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 106) #montage |