moral panic
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Modern usage appears to originate with Jock Young in 1971[1] and Stanley Cohen in 1972.[2] Cohen states that "[they] both probably picked it up from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media".[2]
Noun[edit]
moral panic (plural moral panics)
- A semi-spontaneous or media-generated mass movement based on the perception that an individual, group, community, or culture is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society; a public outcry.
- 2016 July 2, Sophie Gilbert, “Is Moral Panic About Online Porn Misplaced?”, in The Atlantic[1]:
- The psychotherapist Marty Klein likens the current moral panic around online porn to the epidemics of fear and suspicion that sprung up around satanic cults in the 1980s, and even around comic books in the 1950s.
- 2021 June 17, Moira Donegan, “What the moral panic about ‘critical race theory’ is about”, in The Guardian[2], →ISSN:
- But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was.
Translations[edit]
mass movement, public outcry
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References[edit]
- ^ Jock Young (1971) The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use, Paladin, →ISBN, pages 182, 197
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Stanley Cohen (1972) “Introduction to the Third Edition”, in Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edition, New York City: Routledge, published 2010, →ISBN, →OCLC, page XXXV:
- The term 'moral panic' was first used by Jock Young in 'The Role of the Police as Amplifiers of Deviancy, Negotiators of Reality and Translators of Fantasy', in S. Cohen (Ed.), Image of Deviance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 37. We both probably picked it up from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, published in 1964.