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„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!;„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!