Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils And Moral Panics

Moral panic is something that really does have an effect on everyone within society; whether that is personal to the individual, where they feel the panic themselves, or second hand where the moral panic has lead to decisions being made that later affect them in some way. In Stanley Cohen’s book - Folk Devils and Moral Panics, he highlights the basic meaning of moral panic as “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” A very modern example of this is the EU Referendum vote and Brexit.
The media’s role in constructing a moral panic is somewhat limited, it does very little to actually construct it and does a lot more to contribute to an already existing issue. The media would not publish a story that would create a moral panic within society unless they had the back up from a public voice that has authority within the issue. This could be a professional in the field of the story or in the case of Brexit more likely a Politician.
The argument of where a moral panic begins has been debated by many sociologists, questions like “does the panic start from the bottom and progress up, or does it work from the top down from above?” (Goode, E & Ben-Yehuda, N.
2009) have been deliberated for years. These sociologists believe that the elite notices a situation that should cause a moral panic, the voice with authority then raises the issue publicly, that can then be reported on by the media to spread an already existing moral panic. An issue with this process is it makes it rather easy for the elite to manipulate circumstances to fit their agenda’s; this was very prominent during the EU Referendum vote. “The classic orthodox Marxist approach is an ‘elite-engineered’ model. It argues that the elites ‘engineer’ moral panics so they will gain some material or status advantage there from” (Goode, E & Ben-Yehuda, N.
2009).
The media alone are not very good at starting a moral panic from nothing, “on their own, they would not stampede into a scare: their participation in moral panics is a result of the machinations of the rich and the powerful (Hall et al., 1978). It is clear to see that, although the media’s role is important it is not a role of constructing.
Moral panic played a huge part during the campaign process of the EU Referendum. ‘Leave or remain’ became the only question people talked about or read about in newspapers. You can almost guarantee a Brexit story was in every newspaper every day during the campaigns. Each political side used the media to gain some kind of advantage, whether that was a positive message about their own campaign or more likely, a negative moral panic inducing story about their opponent. “Did people vote Leave as the ‘left behind’ or economically disadvantaged, simply to hurt the establishment, did they vote based on moral panic regarding ethnicity, immigration and fears over social cohesion and cultural change (perhaps involving nostalgia for some imagined past)” (Morgan, J. 2016) The idea of manipulating the media for personal gain was something that was used by the leave campaign much more than remain. Remain seemed to go down the route of positive stories about themselves, how Britain needed Europe and the bad things that would happen if society voted leave. Unlike the leave campaign that relied heavily on the media to spread a quite hateful message of immigration being bad. These kinds of stories worked well as it harbours on the mentality of ‘us versus them”, the idea that once cannot survive whilst the other succeeds. “Migrants Milking Britians Benefits” was a front page headline published by the Daily Express in July of 2015