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The Moral Panic of Madeleine McCann Part 1

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann shocked the world as it took the news by storm.  This blog will be discussing the moral panic thesis and explaining the media reporting and the public response to the Madeleine McCann Case.

What is moral panic?

Moral panic is any widespread anxiety that some people feel about an issue that is said to threaten the very fabric of society (Lamb, 2013).  Moral panic is usually in the form of media technology, such as the news, newspapers, blogs and social media etc. 

The term 'Moral Panic' was coined by Stanley Cohen, who was the first to create a systematic empirical study of how the media amplify deviance and public responses and wrote about it in his 1972 book titled, 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics'.  He based his book off of his PhD, which was written in 1967-1969.  In his book, Cohen wrote about how the media responded to huge fights that happened between two gangs (the mods and rockers) in the 1980s.  He saw that the media created a moral panic, between the gangs and police.  Because of these events with the media, the police would break smaller gang fights up with much more violence than before the big fight.




Key Theorists of Moral Panic


Stanley Cohen
“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 stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media...” (Cohen, 1972: 9)


Douglas Adams 

"anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works... Anything invented after your thirty-five is against the natural order of things" (Adams, 2002)

Chase Critcher

“Defining, labelling and punishing their unacceptable behaviour confirm who we are [and] what we believe in or stand for”  (Critcher, 2006:9).








An example that will be discussed in the next blog post is the moral panic surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the media's response.

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