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These panics are generally fueled by Media coverage or outright propaganda around a social issue, although semi-spontaneous moral panics do occur. Mass Hysteria can be an element in these movements, but moral panic is different from mass hysteria in that a moral panic is specifically framed in terms of Morality and is usually expressed as outrage rather than unadulterated Fear . Moral panics (as defined by Stanley Cohen ) revolve around a perceived threat to a value or norm held by a society normally stimulated by glorification within the mass media or 'folk legend' within societies. Panics have a number of outcomes, the most poignant being the certification to the players within the panic that what they are doing appears to warrant observation by mass media and therefore may push them further into the activities that led to the original feeling of moral panic. The influences and behaviors of young people are common themes in many moral panics. ORIGINS AND USE OF THE TERM The term was coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972 to describe media coverage of Mods And Rockers in the United Kingdom in the 1960s . A factor in moral panic is the Deviancy Amplification Spiral , the phenomenon defined by media critics as an increasing cycle of reporting on a category of Antisocial Behavior or other undesirable events. While the term ''moral panic'' is relatively recent, many Social Scientists point to the Middletown Studies , first conducted in 1925 , as containing the first in-depth study of this phenomenon. In these studies, researchers found that community and religious leaders in an American town condemned then-new technology such as the Radio and Automobile for promoting immoral behavior. For example, a pastor interviewed in this study referred to the automobile as a "house of prostitution on wheels," and condemned this brand new invention for giving citizens a way of driving out of town when they should be attending Church . In ''Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order'' (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the reaction to the importation into the U.K. of the heretofore American phenomenon of Mugging . Employing Cohen's definition of ''moral panic,'' Hall ''et. al.'' theorized that the "rising crime rate equation" has an ideological function relating to Social Control . Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis." The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.Hall, S., ''et al''. 1978. ''Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order.'' London: Macmillan Press. ISBN 0333220617 (paperback) ISBN 0333220609 (hardbound) EXAMPLES OF MORAL PANICS A wide variety of real or imagined phenomena have inspired moral panics. s of particular groups. Examples include Anti-Semitic Pogroms , Stalinist purges, the Witch-hunt s of Renaissance Europe and the demonization of Communist s (''see'' " McCarthyism ") in the US during the 1950s. An example of a very real phenomenon which is, nevertheless, often surrounded by moral panic, is '', Wednesday, 18 April 2007 SEE ALSO
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