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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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The mechanism which Golding reveals in his discussion of the media and 'scroungerphobia' is what Stuart Hall and others from the CCCS investigated in their 1978 study of the moral panic over 'mugging'. (Hall et al (1978)). It was with Hall's and others' approach to ideology that the media's use of moral panics to both define and distort social problems was fleshed out into a general critique of the media's construction of social reality.
'Mugging' was presented in the media as a new and rapidly growing phenomenon. In fact, the crime was not new, only the label was, and official statistics did not support the view that it was growing rapidly, except of course to the extent that, once you've come up with a label that didn't exist before, then a number of old offences will inevitably fall under this new heading, thus creating the impression of rapid growth.
According to Hall et al., the media whipped up a moral panic around the issue of mugging, a moral panic which served to legitimate the increase in punitive measures - police 'mugging squads' and heavy sentences. Hall et al. see the media as playing a key rôle in developing and maintaining the pressure for 'law and order' measures. Throughout, according to Hall et al., the media took their information from the primary definers of social reality. The mass media ('secondary definers') amplify the perceived threat to the existing social order and the police and the courts then act to eliminate the threat. Using the Gramscian notion of hegemony, Hall et al demonstrated how the media enlarge the state's influence into everyday life, the moral panic becoming the vehicle for transmission of the dominant ideology.
As with the media campaign against welfare scroungers, the anti-mugger campaign preyed upon working class anxieties and prejudices and focused them on a scapegoat which was, at least in part, supposedly responsible for undermining the core values of society, the consensus. At the same time it suited the dominant classes in society to have other classes united behind those core values which essentially served their interests.
Arguably we in the UK are now (2001) witnessing a similar process of demonization where asylum seekers are concerned, the latest group of folk devils. The Daily Express and the poisonous Daily Mail use the terms 'immigrant', 'refugee' and 'asylum seeker' interchangeably, alleging that we are being overrun by all of these, who are frequently linked with stories of crime and violence, just as the Daily Mail chose more often than not in the 1980s to emphasize black involvement in mugging, a crime which in any case was of no great significance in the statistics. Today it claims that asylum seekers, immigrants (call them what you will - any foreigner who might not share the Daily Mail readers' prejudices, presumably) are major contributors to crime in London, a claim which simply has no foundation. 'Bogus' asylum seekers risk their lives clinging to the outside of cross-Channel ferries, hiding amongst the wheels of Channel Tunnel trains, they hijack airliners to seek refuge in Britain apparently not because they are fleeing starvation, arbitrary arrest and torture, but because they want to live a life a luxury on the £37 a week the British state will give them. The Daily Mail conveniently overlooks the fact that well over a million Afghans have sought refuge in Pakistan. Presumably, the Pakistanis pay £38 a week.
Since the 1997 election of Labour, the two major parties have engaged in a competition to see which can be viler to asylum seekers, pandering to the prejudices of 'Middle England' as reflected in the Daily Mail. Since September 11 2001, the terms 'Muslim', 'fundamentalist' and 'terrorist' have been added indiscriminately to the volatile mix of 'immigrant', 'refugee' and 'asylum seeker' and the pressure builds ineluctably for the government to be seen to be 'doing something'. No doubt any Minister of the Interior would lighten the burden of his office by bringing to heel a pesky judiciary which displays an irritating independence of the executive. Wouldn't it be so much neater too if suspected terrorists could be placed straight into Schutzhaft without the fripperies of trial by jury or even presentation before a judge who might actually release them, let alone all that time-wasting nonsense of actually presenting evidence? Home Secretary David Blunkett, who, as Education Secretary, embarrassingly revealed himself ignorant of arithmetic now shows himself ignorant of history, including his own, quite recent, history, since, from the Opposition benches, he spoke out during the 1991 Gulf War against the apparently arbitrary imprisonment of Iraqis who had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. Since its election in 1997 as a libertarian party committed to the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act, open government, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Labour Party has pursued ever more repressive policies. Anti-terrorist legislation introduced by Blunkett's predecessor, Straw, in 2000 had already defined terrorism in such broad terms that it would be difficult for any protestor to avoid being a 'terrorist'. Now in 2001 Blunkett proposes internment without trial, every authoritarian's wet dream. Perhaps he just wants asylum seekers to feel at home.
Hypodermic needle model
Empiricism
Uses and gratifications
Recent developments
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