He based his theory on media reporting of conflicts between 2 teenage tribes of 1960s. Mods and rockers but his thinking can be applied to any subculture labelled as deviant.
what is a moral panic?
A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order
"The process underscores the importance of the mass media in providing, maintaining and 'policing' the available frameworks and definitions of deviance, which structure both public awareness of, and attitudes towards, social problems."
Those deviant groups were labelled by Stanley Cohen in 1972 as folk devils.( deviance) He based his theory on the media reporting of conflicts between two teenage tribes of the 1960s, the Mods and Rockers, but his thinking can be applied to any subculture labelled as deviant or dangerous by the media.
Cohen's study was primarily about the Mods and Rockers of the 1960's and the treatment they received in the public eye. The main criticism was that they were seen as a threat to law and order largely through the way the mass media represented them, in the form of what Cohen calls the 'control culture'.
Largely this refers to the media sensationalising an event and then calling for a punishment to be set to persecute the offenders.
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