moral panic
In the mid-sixties, a South African sociologist named Stanley Cohen focused on a seemingly parochial topic.
He was interested in news headlines about gangs of “Mods” and “Rockers” clashing at seaside holiday resorts around Great Britain. The narrative had taken the nation, and the world, by storm.
The Mods and Rockers in 1964 were not fully distinguished and had little concrete group identity at the time.
Rockers roughly speaking had long hair and fashioned themselves after American groups like the Hell’s Angels (although they listened to different music).
Mods had cropped or shaved heads, listened to soul, ska, jazz and R&B, and favored tailored clothes. The original skinheads being worshippers of African-American culture and music is an irony that’s seldom mentioned today.
According to media narratives in sixties Britain, these dueling young deviants, minds addled by new forms of music, were desecrating British holiday resorts. The victims were middle- to upper-class Britons enjoying traditional seaside holidays.
Cohen went back to see how closely the real tales matched tabloid descriptions. He went looking for the source of the Nile, sussing out the first “Mod-Rocker” clashes.
One of the first occurred at the small town of Clacton, on the east coast of England. On Easter, 1964, the small town was sopping wet and suffering its coldest temperatures in eighty years.
The shopkeepers were testy about losing tourism money, and young people in the area (the town was a hangout for kids from the East End of London) were grumbling over rumors some restaurant doors would be closed to them.
On that Easter weekend in 1964, a few members of the groups threw rocks at each other on the streets. A couple of beach huts were destroyed. One youth fired a starting pistol in the air. A few were arrested.
Not much of a story.
The press thought otherwise. The Monday after these happenings, every paper in London with the exception of the Times carried the Clacton events on the front page. They included the following headlines:
DAY OF TERROR BY SCOOTER GROUPS
YOUNGSTERS BEAT UP TOWN – 97 LEATHER JACKET ARRESTS
WILD ONES INVADE SEASIDE – 97 ARRESTS
Cohen began to look at other clashes and noticed a pattern. As he wrote:
The next lot of incidents received similar coverage on the Tuesday and editorials began to appear, together with reports that the Home Secretary was ‘being urged’ (it was not usually specified exactly by whom) to hold an inquiry or to take firm action…
Straight reporting gave way to theories especially about motivation: the mob was described as ‘exhilarated’, ‘drunk with notoriety’, ‘hell-bent for destruction’, etc.
Reports of the incidents themselves were followed by accounts of police and court activity and local reaction. The press coverage of each series of incidents showed a similar sequence.
Before long, the story went international. There were articles in America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and other nations. In Belgium, a photo of the disturbances came over the caption, “West Side Story on English Coast.”
A keen observer of language, Cohen smelled fabrication in some of the stories, if only because they were “too stereotypical to be true.” But he couldn’t prove that the many “interviews” tabloid journalists supposedly scored with would-be Mods and Rockers had been invented.
When Cohen looked more closely, he found more that was incorrect in the national reports. Local newspapers were better.
“Not only are the reports more detailed and specific,” he wrote, “but they avoid statements like, ‘all the dance halls near the seafront were smashed’ when every local resident knows there is only one dance hall near the front.”
Cohen found other problems. The “Mods” and the “Rockers” were uniformly described as “affluent young people,” who came to resort towns in a kind of zombie haze.
The fable of “affluent” gangs was elevated in part because of a story – true, as Cohen found – that one of the youths arrested in one of the clashes offered to pay his £75 fine by check. That the haughty kid didn’t have a checking account and was just pressing the buttons of the locals was not reported.
The Mod-Rocker clashes peaked with infamous episodes at the beachside towns of Margate and Brighton. As Cohen discovered, nothing earth-shaking happened in any of the cases. Locals actually spoke warmly of the clashes as having increased tourist traffic.
Moreover, regional coverage put the cost of the damage at Margate – made famous by the sensational Daily Mirror headline, WILD ONES ‘BEAT UP’ MARGATE – at a whopping… £400 pounds.
The papers worked overtime to keep the narrative of out-of-control youth alive in the homes of prim and proper Englanders. Any story they could possibly tie to the Mod-Rocker clashes hit the papers, even if the link was tenuous.
The Dublin Evening Press for instance on May 18, 1964 published:
TERROR COMES TO ENGLISH RESORTS. MUTILATED MOD FOUND IN PARK.
This turned out to be a story about a man in his early twenties found stabbed in a Birmingham park a day before a reported “clash” at a nearby resort. The only thing “mod” about him was that he was found in a “mod jacket,” whatever that is.
A national furor set in. Lawmakers everywhere rushed to get “Malicious Damage Bills” into law, and campaigns against youth music and movies abounded.
There was not a single editorial in any major newspaper that dared play down the threat. Editorials frequently came in tandem with calls for action of increasingly intense variety.
After an incident at Whitsun, the Evening Argus printed 23 letters; seven proposed corporal punishment! There were calls for “using fire hoses on the crowds, tear gas, hard labour schemes, flogging, long prison sentences,” and “banning the offenders from the town.”
Perhaps most important, the tabloids – staffed as they were with people who had few skills, moral or otherwise, beyond being occasionally clever writers – began to master the art of creating dehumanizing symbolic language for both groups.
The favored epithet was “wild ones,” but that was soon accompanied by other descriptors: “vermin,” “ratpack,” “ill conditioned odious louts” (Daily Express), “retarded vain young hot-blooded paycocks” (Daily Sketch), “grubby hordes of louts and sluts” (Daily Telegraph), “their bovine stupidity… their ape-like reactions to the world” (Evening Standard).
Cohen found the most omnipresent descriptors were boredom and affluence. These descriptions played into belief systems of target audiences who were desperate to believe young people were simply lazy, drug-addled, spoiled monsters. In fact, the Mods and Rockers both were mostly undereducated and working class.
In 1972, Cohen would publish a book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, that described all of this. Moral panic has as a result become a permanent part of our lexicon. “Folk devils” were what Cohen called the targets of these instant manias.
Not a reporter, Cohen nailed many of the techniques that make journalism work.
Thanks to Christopher Nolan, pop audiences now know magicians rely upon a basic premise of a pledge, turn, and prestige, i.e. a promise to turn something ordinary into the extraordinary. Show the audience a common top hat, pull a rabbit out of it.
Cohen in examining the mod-rocker mania noticed tabloid reporting worked on a similar premise.
Reporters depicted ordinary life, then showed it disrupted and distorted by contagion. The scare coverage implied future problems and put audiences in a siege-like mentality. Like audiences at a magic show, they’d been trained to wait for the delivery upon the implied promise of coverage: more violence, more social disruption, more headlines.
This set of circumstances in turn led to something that another sociologist, Leslie Wilkins, deemed the “Deviancy Amplification Spiral.”
This was an academic term for “using invented problems to drive people actually crazy.” It went something like this:
1. LESS TOLERANCE
leads to
2. MORE ACTS BEING DEFINED AS CRIMES
leads to
3. MORE ACTIONS AGAINST CRIMINALS
leads to
4. MORE ALIENATION OF DEVIANTS
leads to
5. LESS TOLERANCE OF DEVIANTS BY CONFORMING GROUPS
leads back to #2, etc.
With this circular method, you could take small incidents and blow them into national terrors in a snap, and God only knew when they’d stop.
All this research was groundbreaking and impacted the thinking of sociologists and academics around the world from the early seventies on.
It did not, however, much penetrate the consciousness of editors and news directors, who continued to profit off moral panics whenever possible. They ran audiences through the same Satanic spin cycle for decades.
American news consumers will remember many of the worst examples.
During the sleepy years of the later Cold War, shlock magazines like Time and Newsweek constantly tried to sell us on the next “folk devil” invasion.
Editors knew: the target magazine reader plopping down in the chair of a doctor’s waiting room is desperate to find fellow travelers on the bandwagon of fears most middle-aged people have about the confusing changes in their once-lovable children.
Why is little Johnny suddenly so taciturn? Could it be the drugs? The glue? The music? The alarming new sexual mores? Pick up Newsweek and find out!
Weeklies for decades cycled through TEENS: HORNY AND OUT OF CONTROL covers. If you look back you’ll notice, humorously, there’s usually a well-placed teen female derriere on the front of such efforts.
Teen pregnancy has been another favored topic. To scare the pants off parents, mags will make sure the third-trimester horror on the cover looks no older than eight.
The mystery of your suddenly aloof child’s brain, your child as tyrant who needs a hell of a spanking (think of the “corporal punishment” letters in Cohen’s study), and, of course, your child as potential rifle-toting mass murderer are other popular themes.
Moral panics were once very likely to involve a “something is corrupting your otherwise angelic youth” theme.
The “Dungeons and Dragons” terror of the early eighties was an example. Some of us are old enough to remember the absurd scare flick Mazes and Monsters, starring an early version of America’s most dependable moral-panic frontman, Tom Hanks.
Often the panic came hand in hand with a ready legal solution. Tipper Gore’s “Parents Music Resource Center” freakout over heavy metal lyrics was an eighties re-hash of Mod-Rocker fear. The solution, thankfully, was tame: warning labels. The same craze today would likely result in a Heritage Foundation council working with iTunes to secretly remove morally threatening music.
Reporters were always allowed tons of leeway when investigating moral panics. The thinnest statistical reeds would do.
Time ran an infamous “CYBERPORN” cover in 1995 showing a shocked kiddie looking aghast into the evil glow of a computer screen. The reader is left to imagine the awful image the boy must be seeing.
The piece was based on a bogus undergraduate research report about rising cyber-threats by a mysterious figure called Marty Rimm, who shortly after disappeared.
Time writer Philip Elmer-Dewitt later wrote eloquently about being too young to realize he’d been duped. In retrospect, he wrote the piece was the worst combination, i.e. good writing, bad facts:
One Time researcher assigned to my story remembers the study as “one of the more shameful, fear-mongering and unscientific efforts that we ever gave attention to.”
Nonetheless, the Time cover caused political figures like Ralph Reed and Chuck Grassley to spring into action demanding censorship of the Interwebs.
Another early Time cover telling parents to worry about the impact of video games may not have predicted mass social contagion, but did hint at a future football star (“GRONK! FLASH! ZAP!”).
There were constant variations on “techno-panic” themes, suggesting new technologies would addict children to profanity, violence, peeping, sexual deviancy, and other terrors.
Moral panics tended to have the most profound consequences for “folk devils” who were politically under-represented. The War on Drugs has arguably been the most devastating ongoing panic of all, dating back to the unintentionally comic Reefer Madness.
It would be impossible to calculate how many unnecessary years in jail have been handed out to dealers and users thanks to blunt moral-panic stunts like George H.W. Bush holding up a bag of crack supposedly bought outside the White House (the offender had actually been lured from across town).
We’ve had terrors over Y2K, SARS, Bioterror/Anthrax, day care molesters, and countless other devils.
There was even a hoax scare over teens using a Zambian hallucinogen called jenkem – brewed from fermented human waste – that turned out not to have any confirmed American cases. But it made for good copy. “Jenkem: Stay Alert or Call it a Hoax?” wondered ABC in 2007.
A few sociologists over the years noted moral panics benefited the interested players in a particular way. There was symbiosis between big commercial news outlets and state authorities.
Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the “folk devil” of the moment. A perfect partnership.
The crack story exemplified this.
TV stations glamorized the “wars” on the streets, got great ratings, yet rarely got to the heart of what the crack epidemic was: a way for cocaine cartels to expand the consumer base beyond the saturated market of upper-class buyers of powder coke. Crack was just the cartel version of a corporate marketing ploy to rope in poorer consumers.
Poor crackheads scared the public so much, authorities got almost anything they asked to fight them. The most infamous reform was the so-called 100-1 sentencing laws, which gave crack offenders sentences 100 times longer than powder offenders.
This is the hallmark of the moral panic. It’s a real story, but it’s exaggerated, often wildly, and comes wrapped in proposals for authoritarian solutions.
The only thing preventing the moral panic from becoming the dominant model of commercial press in the past was that we in the media had other ways to make money.
As Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News explained to me, newspapers in the pre-Internet days were cash machines. They had their own networks of trucks and distribution points, and if you wanted to find a worker for hire or sell a car, the only game in town was the local paper.
“These were scarcity businesses,” is how he put it.
It was the same with local radio and TV stations, limited in number because each needed FCC licenses. There were only so many 30-second spots on the air.
If you had a radio show or a daily newspaper, you didn’t have to wind up the local Junior Anti-Sex League to torch-bearing action every week to sell copies. You made enough on classified and local ads that you could safely not indulge in fearmongering insanity, if you so chose.
Smart people, however, understood the instant that cash cow disappeared, the media business would change forever. No less an authority than Marshall McLuhan, in his famed book Understanding Media, wrote way back in 1964:
The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold…
In the Internet age, the news media has, completely, lost classified ads.
We have also lost the distribution advantage. The trucks and paper-kids no longer have much value in the age of one-click searches.
The instant relay of stock market quotes, which made empires out of services like Reuters and Bloomberg, no longer much impresses business consumers.
We’re left to hunt other game now.
Accelerated by social media, the moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.
Until recently, crime has been the great example. Despite what the public believes, crime has been declining precipitously in America for nearly three decades.
Because so much news programming depends upon beliefs to the contrary – to say nothing of politicians who depend upon scare tactics and “tough on crime” platforms to get into office – we rarely hear about this, thanks to a number of scams the press has employed over the years.
One is cherry-picking sources for crime stats. Every crime reporter will tell you there are two major outlets for national crime statistics, particularly violent crime: the annual reports by the FBI, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Both are outputs of the Department of Justice, but the BJS uses the same methodology every year (it’s based upon broad surveys of households, asking people if they were victims of crimes) and tends to report less alarming statistics.
Newspapers inevitably use FBI stats, which use varying methodologies and somehow always come out a little scarier.
Going by the FBI, violent crime fell 49% between 1993 and 2017. By the BJS, violent crime fell 74% during the same period.
But the public doesn’t believe it.
There have been 22 Gallup surveys asking about violent crime since 1993. In 18 of them, Americans believed crime was rising. Significantly, the numbers change if you ask people about crime in their neighborhoods, where most people see flat or declining dangers. Thus the typical belief system of an American media consumer is: crime may be down in my area, but it’s surely way up somewhere else.
It’s easy to play with numbers. NUMBER OF KILLINGS SOARS IN BIG CITIES ACROSS U.S., wrote the New York Times on July 18, 1990.
Read carefully:
Murder rates have increased steadily over the past several years. After reaching a peak of 10.2 killings per 100,000 population in 1980, the rate fell to 7.9 per 100,000 in 1984 and 1985, a decline that officials attribute to the drop in numbers of people in their teens and 20's. The rate has since rebounded, reaching 8.4 in 1988, the last year for which the F.B.I. has figures broken down in that way.
In other words, the Times in 1990 could have written the murder rate was down compared to 1980. But they chose to use the more recent swing upward as a hook. In the long run, of course, violent crime declined after 1990, and has overall since 1980. 1988 proved a high-water mark.
The only brake on this kind of behavior in the past was the potential that another news outlet might call BS. This rarely happened, since even rival news agencies tended to collectively benefit from any scare. But the possibility at least existed.
Today, in a politically cleaved media landscape, reporters know there is less danger than ever that their target audiences will be exposed to dispositive information. Rival publications do not reach rival audiences. MSNBC viewers do not read the Daily Caller and vice versa.
Moral panics therefore rage on, essentially unchallenged, in every corner of the political universe.
The 2018 “caravan” of Central American immigrants was a classic moral panic. Immigrant stories frequently are. The caravan had all the hallmarks, with simplistic symbolic language describing the “invaders” (“criminals,” “gang members,” etc), along with the classic over-prescribed authoritarian solution – troops, literally told by the president they could consider a rock in the hands of an immigrant to be a firearm, i.e. shoot them if so engaged.
President Trump later walked back the idea, but this was all a typical panic tale.
Not having interviewed the people arriving, I couldn’t tell you which group of reporters is correct on one of the other central questions. Were the migrants attempting simple immigration, i.e. were they just looking for better living conditions, in which case their journey was technically illegal? Or were they seeking asylum from violence or political oppression, which is legal under international law and requires the host country to grant hearings?
Who knows? It was probably a mix of both. One thing, however, seems certain. Seven thousand migrants was not an “invasion.”
This would have been a minor, if depressing, story, were it not in the eye of a furious maelstrom surrounding the politics of Donald Trump. It might not have been reported at all in the Bush or Obama years.
Similar to the crime story, the immigration furor has mostly rested upon the pumping up of anecdotal information about border crossings. Placed in proper context, we’re talking about a problem (if it’s even that) that’s declined significantly since 9/11. It’s the Mods and the Rockers clashing at the border, only on a much bigger scale, with much more prominent political players mixed up in the cultural argument.
The same kinds of reporting techniques increasingly dominate anti-Trump media, however.
The constant drumbeat of “It’s the beginning of the end” stories about “bombshells” causing the “walls” to “close in” on Trump – so comic that a mash-up of such comments dating to Trump’s first week in office has gone viral – is a case of straight-up emotional grifting.
Editors know Democratic audiences are devastated by the fact of the Trump presidency, so they constantly hint at hope that he’ll be dragged away in handcuffs at any moment. This is despite the fact that reporters know the legal avenues for removal are extraordinarily unlikely.
Such puffing of false hopes is the most emotionally predatory behavior that exists in journalism.
If you do a TRUMP’S FINAL DAYS story in Politico in September 2018, there’s no penalty when he’s still in office weeks later. These stories get a lot of hits.
Meanwhile, the rare articles in the liberal press warning audiences not to expect a Nixon-like exit tomorrow – like the Guardian piece from July, 2018, WHAT LIBERALS (STILL) GET WRONG ABOUT TRUMP’S SUPPORT – tend to disappear quickly.
Even worse has been the Russiagate business. The topic probably deserves more of a book than a paragraph, but no matter what your position on the underlying narrative, it’s been a clear case of moral-panic journalism on top of whatever the actual issue turns out to be.
The press for instance has stopped making distinctions between individual Russians and “Russia,” assuming somehow one Russian must be in communication with the other 150 million.
When special prosecutor Robert Mueller submitted in a filing that an Olympic weightlifter promised “political synergy” to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (an overture Cohen “did not follow up on,” according to Mueller himself), the press jumped. Here is Franklin Foer of Slate, who wrote some of the first Russiagate pieces:
Cohen was talking "political synergy" with the Russians in November, 2015. November, 2015! That's further dates back than most timelines of collusion usually begin.
So “a weightlifter” becomes “the Russians” instantaneously, and the minor fact of the communication never going anywhere is left out. Imagine if a “Putin lawyer” contacted Hulk Hogan and the Russian press reported “CONTACT WITH AMERICANS!!!”
We would think this was crazy. But it’s typical of what happens in these tales.
The reporting surrounding the infamous “Internet Research Agency” ads was also a virtual copy of Cohen’s findings about how statistics can be bent to fit narratives.
In the fall of 2017, the New York Times worked hand in hand with a collection of unnamed sources, congressional authorities, and self-interested think-tankers (who’ve been gobbling up grant money to study the new red threat) to create a devastating portrait of Russian subversion via the Facebook ads. This is from a monster 10,000-word piece by Scott Shane and Mark Mazetti called THE PLOT TO SUBVERT AN ELECTION. The money quote:
Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.
The “126 million” stat has been quoted and re-quoted over and over, despite it actually representing a remote hypothetical. In Senate testimony, Facebook executives said the statistic represented the number of people who “may have been served” by one of the 80,000 posts over the course of a 194-week period – nearly three full years – between 2015 and 2017.
Facebook executive Colin Stretch testified before the Senate that during the same period, “Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or ‘served,’ a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds.”
This means the IRA content represented a whopping .0000000024 of all impressions seen during this time. The BBC, conspicuously not an American outlet, was one of the few agencies to put the IRA numbers in context, calling the ads a “drop in the bucket.”
Does that mean the IRA ads are a non-story? No. They are certainly concerning and worth investigating. But this is one of many instances of the scale of an issue clearly being exaggerated.
Moreover, it’s been hard not to notice the usual moral-panic symbiosis in full effect: the prolonged scare has translated into heightened profits for media companies, and aggressive calls for increased powers of censorship and enforcement for government, ironically to control the spread of “fake news.”
What Stanley Cohen described over fifty years ago was a pale preview of what was to come. Cohen saw a primitive effort by cash-hungry tabloids to slap simplistic, symbolic labels on “deviant” groups.
The tabloids were highly effective in creating an “ick” factor around their Mod and Rocker villains, even stripping them of sympathetic characteristics they had in real life, like working-class backgrounds. Without public defenders, media audiences were free to despise them without restraint, and embellish their anti-portraits in their heads.
In America in the eighties and nineties there were usually people to counter such public panics. For every Tipper Gore, there was a Frank Zappa or Dee Snider appearing for the defense.
In our new cleaved and atomized landscape, those brakes are gone. Every demographic has its own folk devils, who go undefended.
Conservative media long ago fixated on libs, commies, terrorists, Islamicists, tax-and-spenders, feminazis, and countless others. No one shows up on Fox to plead for context.
#Resistance media now has devils of its own: deplorables, white supremacists, Trumpites, Bernie Bros, neo-Naderites, false equivalencers, dirtbag-lefters, and countless others.
Even the hated subgroups have developed their own demons, from normies to Hillbots to never-Trumpers and the “deep state.”
Without any way to put a brake on such passions, the new normal will be coexisting, dueling panics: the caravan versus Russiagate, “the beginning of the end” versus “How the Left lost its mind,” Breitbart versus The Palmer Report. Few audiences of any of these outlets will realize they’re engaged in similar behaviors to those of hated antagonists.
The only constant will be more and more authoritarian solutions. In the social media age, we can scare you as never before. Which means politicians will have an easier time obtaining permission for censorship, surveillance, immigration bans, and other expanded powers.
This is the major departure from the Manufacturing Consent age. In 1985, the popular demons were objects of universal terror, usually an external threat – Soviets, Sandinistas, the AIDS virus.
Today pockets of media consumers demonize one another, calling for dueling crackdowns. We have become our own worst enemies, and the longer the cycles play out, the more authoritarian will be our world.
One last note. One of the reasons this trend is worsening has to do with class changes in this business (ironically, this is the subject of this coming week’s chapter).
The old days were obviously no panacea. Reporters until recently almost uniformly were white men, which had an obvious deleterious effect on journalism.
However, back in the day, reporters did tend to come from a different class than the people they reported on in government. A newspaperman in the forties or fifties socially was somewhere between a plumber and the administrator of a typing school. Often he was not college-educated.
Celebrated radio man Walter Winchell worked for a newspaper called “The Graphic” early in his career. Legend has it he was asked in those days if he worked at a newspaper. He supposedly joked in reply: “Yeah, but don’t tell my mother. She still thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” Might be an apocryphal story, but it gives a clue about where the newspaperman was class-wise back then.
Meanwhile the worthies who established the OSS and later the CIA were almost exclusively products of the Ivy League. The cliches about the Bushes bringing their goofball Skull and Bones sensibility to secret service governance were true. The secret agent was a silver spoon creature.
There was therefore a natural antipathy – at least a little – between some reporters and the self-appointed philosopher-kings who worked in secret agencies and spent their days deciding what the world map would look like.
That antipathy is gone today. Reporters, especially national ones, often come from the same schools as FBI and spy chiefs, and they worship the big brains at Langley. There’s an obsession with credentials and resumes that would have made reporters of the Sy Hersh school puke.
So when unnamed “officials” with secret clearances call reporters today, reporters wet themselves. They’ll print anything they’re told, and they don’t even need to be bribed or intimidated into doing it. This is a major reason these unconfirmable stories are so easy to place now.
The press used to be at least a bit of a tough crowd. Now, it’s a laugh track, and the joke is on us.
He was interested in news headlines about gangs of “Mods” and “Rockers” clashing at seaside holiday resorts around Great Britain. The narrative had taken the nation, and the world, by storm.
The Mods and Rockers in 1964 were not fully distinguished and had little concrete group identity at the time.
Rockers roughly speaking had long hair and fashioned themselves after American groups like the Hell’s Angels (although they listened to different music).
Mods had cropped or shaved heads, listened to soul, ska, jazz and R&B, and favored tailored clothes. The original skinheads being worshippers of African-American culture and music is an irony that’s seldom mentioned today.
According to media narratives in sixties Britain, these dueling young deviants, minds addled by new forms of music, were desecrating British holiday resorts. The victims were middle- to upper-class Britons enjoying traditional seaside holidays.
Cohen went back to see how closely the real tales matched tabloid descriptions. He went looking for the source of the Nile, sussing out the first “Mod-Rocker” clashes.
One of the first occurred at the small town of Clacton, on the east coast of England. On Easter, 1964, the small town was sopping wet and suffering its coldest temperatures in eighty years.
The shopkeepers were testy about losing tourism money, and young people in the area (the town was a hangout for kids from the East End of London) were grumbling over rumors some restaurant doors would be closed to them.
On that Easter weekend in 1964, a few members of the groups threw rocks at each other on the streets. A couple of beach huts were destroyed. One youth fired a starting pistol in the air. A few were arrested.
Not much of a story.
The press thought otherwise. The Monday after these happenings, every paper in London with the exception of the Times carried the Clacton events on the front page. They included the following headlines:
DAY OF TERROR BY SCOOTER GROUPS
YOUNGSTERS BEAT UP TOWN – 97 LEATHER JACKET ARRESTS
WILD ONES INVADE SEASIDE – 97 ARRESTS
Cohen began to look at other clashes and noticed a pattern. As he wrote:
The next lot of incidents received similar coverage on the Tuesday and editorials began to appear, together with reports that the Home Secretary was ‘being urged’ (it was not usually specified exactly by whom) to hold an inquiry or to take firm action…
Straight reporting gave way to theories especially about motivation: the mob was described as ‘exhilarated’, ‘drunk with notoriety’, ‘hell-bent for destruction’, etc.
Reports of the incidents themselves were followed by accounts of police and court activity and local reaction. The press coverage of each series of incidents showed a similar sequence.
Before long, the story went international. There were articles in America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and other nations. In Belgium, a photo of the disturbances came over the caption, “West Side Story on English Coast.”
A keen observer of language, Cohen smelled fabrication in some of the stories, if only because they were “too stereotypical to be true.” But he couldn’t prove that the many “interviews” tabloid journalists supposedly scored with would-be Mods and Rockers had been invented.
When Cohen looked more closely, he found more that was incorrect in the national reports. Local newspapers were better.
“Not only are the reports more detailed and specific,” he wrote, “but they avoid statements like, ‘all the dance halls near the seafront were smashed’ when every local resident knows there is only one dance hall near the front.”
Cohen found other problems. The “Mods” and the “Rockers” were uniformly described as “affluent young people,” who came to resort towns in a kind of zombie haze.
The fable of “affluent” gangs was elevated in part because of a story – true, as Cohen found – that one of the youths arrested in one of the clashes offered to pay his £75 fine by check. That the haughty kid didn’t have a checking account and was just pressing the buttons of the locals was not reported.
The Mod-Rocker clashes peaked with infamous episodes at the beachside towns of Margate and Brighton. As Cohen discovered, nothing earth-shaking happened in any of the cases. Locals actually spoke warmly of the clashes as having increased tourist traffic.
Moreover, regional coverage put the cost of the damage at Margate – made famous by the sensational Daily Mirror headline, WILD ONES ‘BEAT UP’ MARGATE – at a whopping… £400 pounds.
The papers worked overtime to keep the narrative of out-of-control youth alive in the homes of prim and proper Englanders. Any story they could possibly tie to the Mod-Rocker clashes hit the papers, even if the link was tenuous.
The Dublin Evening Press for instance on May 18, 1964 published:
TERROR COMES TO ENGLISH RESORTS. MUTILATED MOD FOUND IN PARK.
This turned out to be a story about a man in his early twenties found stabbed in a Birmingham park a day before a reported “clash” at a nearby resort. The only thing “mod” about him was that he was found in a “mod jacket,” whatever that is.
A national furor set in. Lawmakers everywhere rushed to get “Malicious Damage Bills” into law, and campaigns against youth music and movies abounded.
There was not a single editorial in any major newspaper that dared play down the threat. Editorials frequently came in tandem with calls for action of increasingly intense variety.
After an incident at Whitsun, the Evening Argus printed 23 letters; seven proposed corporal punishment! There were calls for “using fire hoses on the crowds, tear gas, hard labour schemes, flogging, long prison sentences,” and “banning the offenders from the town.”
Perhaps most important, the tabloids – staffed as they were with people who had few skills, moral or otherwise, beyond being occasionally clever writers – began to master the art of creating dehumanizing symbolic language for both groups.
The favored epithet was “wild ones,” but that was soon accompanied by other descriptors: “vermin,” “ratpack,” “ill conditioned odious louts” (Daily Express), “retarded vain young hot-blooded paycocks” (Daily Sketch), “grubby hordes of louts and sluts” (Daily Telegraph), “their bovine stupidity… their ape-like reactions to the world” (Evening Standard).
Cohen found the most omnipresent descriptors were boredom and affluence. These descriptions played into belief systems of target audiences who were desperate to believe young people were simply lazy, drug-addled, spoiled monsters. In fact, the Mods and Rockers both were mostly undereducated and working class.
In 1972, Cohen would publish a book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, that described all of this. Moral panic has as a result become a permanent part of our lexicon. “Folk devils” were what Cohen called the targets of these instant manias.
Not a reporter, Cohen nailed many of the techniques that make journalism work.
Thanks to Christopher Nolan, pop audiences now know magicians rely upon a basic premise of a pledge, turn, and prestige, i.e. a promise to turn something ordinary into the extraordinary. Show the audience a common top hat, pull a rabbit out of it.
Cohen in examining the mod-rocker mania noticed tabloid reporting worked on a similar premise.
Reporters depicted ordinary life, then showed it disrupted and distorted by contagion. The scare coverage implied future problems and put audiences in a siege-like mentality. Like audiences at a magic show, they’d been trained to wait for the delivery upon the implied promise of coverage: more violence, more social disruption, more headlines.
This set of circumstances in turn led to something that another sociologist, Leslie Wilkins, deemed the “Deviancy Amplification Spiral.”
This was an academic term for “using invented problems to drive people actually crazy.” It went something like this:
1. LESS TOLERANCE
leads to
2. MORE ACTS BEING DEFINED AS CRIMES
leads to
3. MORE ACTIONS AGAINST CRIMINALS
leads to
4. MORE ALIENATION OF DEVIANTS
leads to
5. LESS TOLERANCE OF DEVIANTS BY CONFORMING GROUPS
leads back to #2, etc.
With this circular method, you could take small incidents and blow them into national terrors in a snap, and God only knew when they’d stop.
All this research was groundbreaking and impacted the thinking of sociologists and academics around the world from the early seventies on.
It did not, however, much penetrate the consciousness of editors and news directors, who continued to profit off moral panics whenever possible. They ran audiences through the same Satanic spin cycle for decades.
American news consumers will remember many of the worst examples.
During the sleepy years of the later Cold War, shlock magazines like Time and Newsweek constantly tried to sell us on the next “folk devil” invasion.
Editors knew: the target magazine reader plopping down in the chair of a doctor’s waiting room is desperate to find fellow travelers on the bandwagon of fears most middle-aged people have about the confusing changes in their once-lovable children.
Why is little Johnny suddenly so taciturn? Could it be the drugs? The glue? The music? The alarming new sexual mores? Pick up Newsweek and find out!
Weeklies for decades cycled through TEENS: HORNY AND OUT OF CONTROL covers. If you look back you’ll notice, humorously, there’s usually a well-placed teen female derriere on the front of such efforts.
Teen pregnancy has been another favored topic. To scare the pants off parents, mags will make sure the third-trimester horror on the cover looks no older than eight.
The mystery of your suddenly aloof child’s brain, your child as tyrant who needs a hell of a spanking (think of the “corporal punishment” letters in Cohen’s study), and, of course, your child as potential rifle-toting mass murderer are other popular themes.
Moral panics were once very likely to involve a “something is corrupting your otherwise angelic youth” theme.
The “Dungeons and Dragons” terror of the early eighties was an example. Some of us are old enough to remember the absurd scare flick Mazes and Monsters, starring an early version of America’s most dependable moral-panic frontman, Tom Hanks.
Often the panic came hand in hand with a ready legal solution. Tipper Gore’s “Parents Music Resource Center” freakout over heavy metal lyrics was an eighties re-hash of Mod-Rocker fear. The solution, thankfully, was tame: warning labels. The same craze today would likely result in a Heritage Foundation council working with iTunes to secretly remove morally threatening music.
Reporters were always allowed tons of leeway when investigating moral panics. The thinnest statistical reeds would do.
Time ran an infamous “CYBERPORN” cover in 1995 showing a shocked kiddie looking aghast into the evil glow of a computer screen. The reader is left to imagine the awful image the boy must be seeing.
The piece was based on a bogus undergraduate research report about rising cyber-threats by a mysterious figure called Marty Rimm, who shortly after disappeared.
Time writer Philip Elmer-Dewitt later wrote eloquently about being too young to realize he’d been duped. In retrospect, he wrote the piece was the worst combination, i.e. good writing, bad facts:
One Time researcher assigned to my story remembers the study as “one of the more shameful, fear-mongering and unscientific efforts that we ever gave attention to.”
Nonetheless, the Time cover caused political figures like Ralph Reed and Chuck Grassley to spring into action demanding censorship of the Interwebs.
Another early Time cover telling parents to worry about the impact of video games may not have predicted mass social contagion, but did hint at a future football star (“GRONK! FLASH! ZAP!”).
There were constant variations on “techno-panic” themes, suggesting new technologies would addict children to profanity, violence, peeping, sexual deviancy, and other terrors.
Moral panics tended to have the most profound consequences for “folk devils” who were politically under-represented. The War on Drugs has arguably been the most devastating ongoing panic of all, dating back to the unintentionally comic Reefer Madness.
It would be impossible to calculate how many unnecessary years in jail have been handed out to dealers and users thanks to blunt moral-panic stunts like George H.W. Bush holding up a bag of crack supposedly bought outside the White House (the offender had actually been lured from across town).
We’ve had terrors over Y2K, SARS, Bioterror/Anthrax, day care molesters, and countless other devils.
There was even a hoax scare over teens using a Zambian hallucinogen called jenkem – brewed from fermented human waste – that turned out not to have any confirmed American cases. But it made for good copy. “Jenkem: Stay Alert or Call it a Hoax?” wondered ABC in 2007.
A few sociologists over the years noted moral panics benefited the interested players in a particular way. There was symbiosis between big commercial news outlets and state authorities.
Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the “folk devil” of the moment. A perfect partnership.
The crack story exemplified this.
TV stations glamorized the “wars” on the streets, got great ratings, yet rarely got to the heart of what the crack epidemic was: a way for cocaine cartels to expand the consumer base beyond the saturated market of upper-class buyers of powder coke. Crack was just the cartel version of a corporate marketing ploy to rope in poorer consumers.
Poor crackheads scared the public so much, authorities got almost anything they asked to fight them. The most infamous reform was the so-called 100-1 sentencing laws, which gave crack offenders sentences 100 times longer than powder offenders.
This is the hallmark of the moral panic. It’s a real story, but it’s exaggerated, often wildly, and comes wrapped in proposals for authoritarian solutions.
The only thing preventing the moral panic from becoming the dominant model of commercial press in the past was that we in the media had other ways to make money.
As Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News explained to me, newspapers in the pre-Internet days were cash machines. They had their own networks of trucks and distribution points, and if you wanted to find a worker for hire or sell a car, the only game in town was the local paper.
“These were scarcity businesses,” is how he put it.
It was the same with local radio and TV stations, limited in number because each needed FCC licenses. There were only so many 30-second spots on the air.
If you had a radio show or a daily newspaper, you didn’t have to wind up the local Junior Anti-Sex League to torch-bearing action every week to sell copies. You made enough on classified and local ads that you could safely not indulge in fearmongering insanity, if you so chose.
Smart people, however, understood the instant that cash cow disappeared, the media business would change forever. No less an authority than Marshall McLuhan, in his famed book Understanding Media, wrote way back in 1964:
The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold…
In the Internet age, the news media has, completely, lost classified ads.
We have also lost the distribution advantage. The trucks and paper-kids no longer have much value in the age of one-click searches.
The instant relay of stock market quotes, which made empires out of services like Reuters and Bloomberg, no longer much impresses business consumers.
We’re left to hunt other game now.
Accelerated by social media, the moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.
Until recently, crime has been the great example. Despite what the public believes, crime has been declining precipitously in America for nearly three decades.
Because so much news programming depends upon beliefs to the contrary – to say nothing of politicians who depend upon scare tactics and “tough on crime” platforms to get into office – we rarely hear about this, thanks to a number of scams the press has employed over the years.
One is cherry-picking sources for crime stats. Every crime reporter will tell you there are two major outlets for national crime statistics, particularly violent crime: the annual reports by the FBI, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Both are outputs of the Department of Justice, but the BJS uses the same methodology every year (it’s based upon broad surveys of households, asking people if they were victims of crimes) and tends to report less alarming statistics.
Newspapers inevitably use FBI stats, which use varying methodologies and somehow always come out a little scarier.
Going by the FBI, violent crime fell 49% between 1993 and 2017. By the BJS, violent crime fell 74% during the same period.
But the public doesn’t believe it.
There have been 22 Gallup surveys asking about violent crime since 1993. In 18 of them, Americans believed crime was rising. Significantly, the numbers change if you ask people about crime in their neighborhoods, where most people see flat or declining dangers. Thus the typical belief system of an American media consumer is: crime may be down in my area, but it’s surely way up somewhere else.
It’s easy to play with numbers. NUMBER OF KILLINGS SOARS IN BIG CITIES ACROSS U.S., wrote the New York Times on July 18, 1990.
Read carefully:
Murder rates have increased steadily over the past several years. After reaching a peak of 10.2 killings per 100,000 population in 1980, the rate fell to 7.9 per 100,000 in 1984 and 1985, a decline that officials attribute to the drop in numbers of people in their teens and 20's. The rate has since rebounded, reaching 8.4 in 1988, the last year for which the F.B.I. has figures broken down in that way.
In other words, the Times in 1990 could have written the murder rate was down compared to 1980. But they chose to use the more recent swing upward as a hook. In the long run, of course, violent crime declined after 1990, and has overall since 1980. 1988 proved a high-water mark.
The only brake on this kind of behavior in the past was the potential that another news outlet might call BS. This rarely happened, since even rival news agencies tended to collectively benefit from any scare. But the possibility at least existed.
Today, in a politically cleaved media landscape, reporters know there is less danger than ever that their target audiences will be exposed to dispositive information. Rival publications do not reach rival audiences. MSNBC viewers do not read the Daily Caller and vice versa.
Moral panics therefore rage on, essentially unchallenged, in every corner of the political universe.
The 2018 “caravan” of Central American immigrants was a classic moral panic. Immigrant stories frequently are. The caravan had all the hallmarks, with simplistic symbolic language describing the “invaders” (“criminals,” “gang members,” etc), along with the classic over-prescribed authoritarian solution – troops, literally told by the president they could consider a rock in the hands of an immigrant to be a firearm, i.e. shoot them if so engaged.
President Trump later walked back the idea, but this was all a typical panic tale.
Not having interviewed the people arriving, I couldn’t tell you which group of reporters is correct on one of the other central questions. Were the migrants attempting simple immigration, i.e. were they just looking for better living conditions, in which case their journey was technically illegal? Or were they seeking asylum from violence or political oppression, which is legal under international law and requires the host country to grant hearings?
Who knows? It was probably a mix of both. One thing, however, seems certain. Seven thousand migrants was not an “invasion.”
This would have been a minor, if depressing, story, were it not in the eye of a furious maelstrom surrounding the politics of Donald Trump. It might not have been reported at all in the Bush or Obama years.
Similar to the crime story, the immigration furor has mostly rested upon the pumping up of anecdotal information about border crossings. Placed in proper context, we’re talking about a problem (if it’s even that) that’s declined significantly since 9/11. It’s the Mods and the Rockers clashing at the border, only on a much bigger scale, with much more prominent political players mixed up in the cultural argument.
The same kinds of reporting techniques increasingly dominate anti-Trump media, however.
The constant drumbeat of “It’s the beginning of the end” stories about “bombshells” causing the “walls” to “close in” on Trump – so comic that a mash-up of such comments dating to Trump’s first week in office has gone viral – is a case of straight-up emotional grifting.
Editors know Democratic audiences are devastated by the fact of the Trump presidency, so they constantly hint at hope that he’ll be dragged away in handcuffs at any moment. This is despite the fact that reporters know the legal avenues for removal are extraordinarily unlikely.
Such puffing of false hopes is the most emotionally predatory behavior that exists in journalism.
If you do a TRUMP’S FINAL DAYS story in Politico in September 2018, there’s no penalty when he’s still in office weeks later. These stories get a lot of hits.
Meanwhile, the rare articles in the liberal press warning audiences not to expect a Nixon-like exit tomorrow – like the Guardian piece from July, 2018, WHAT LIBERALS (STILL) GET WRONG ABOUT TRUMP’S SUPPORT – tend to disappear quickly.
Even worse has been the Russiagate business. The topic probably deserves more of a book than a paragraph, but no matter what your position on the underlying narrative, it’s been a clear case of moral-panic journalism on top of whatever the actual issue turns out to be.
The press for instance has stopped making distinctions between individual Russians and “Russia,” assuming somehow one Russian must be in communication with the other 150 million.
When special prosecutor Robert Mueller submitted in a filing that an Olympic weightlifter promised “political synergy” to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (an overture Cohen “did not follow up on,” according to Mueller himself), the press jumped. Here is Franklin Foer of Slate, who wrote some of the first Russiagate pieces:
Cohen was talking "political synergy" with the Russians in November, 2015. November, 2015! That's further dates back than most timelines of collusion usually begin.
So “a weightlifter” becomes “the Russians” instantaneously, and the minor fact of the communication never going anywhere is left out. Imagine if a “Putin lawyer” contacted Hulk Hogan and the Russian press reported “CONTACT WITH AMERICANS!!!”
We would think this was crazy. But it’s typical of what happens in these tales.
The reporting surrounding the infamous “Internet Research Agency” ads was also a virtual copy of Cohen’s findings about how statistics can be bent to fit narratives.
In the fall of 2017, the New York Times worked hand in hand with a collection of unnamed sources, congressional authorities, and self-interested think-tankers (who’ve been gobbling up grant money to study the new red threat) to create a devastating portrait of Russian subversion via the Facebook ads. This is from a monster 10,000-word piece by Scott Shane and Mark Mazetti called THE PLOT TO SUBVERT AN ELECTION. The money quote:
Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election.
The “126 million” stat has been quoted and re-quoted over and over, despite it actually representing a remote hypothetical. In Senate testimony, Facebook executives said the statistic represented the number of people who “may have been served” by one of the 80,000 posts over the course of a 194-week period – nearly three full years – between 2015 and 2017.
Facebook executive Colin Stretch testified before the Senate that during the same period, “Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or ‘served,’ a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds.”
This means the IRA content represented a whopping .0000000024 of all impressions seen during this time. The BBC, conspicuously not an American outlet, was one of the few agencies to put the IRA numbers in context, calling the ads a “drop in the bucket.”
Does that mean the IRA ads are a non-story? No. They are certainly concerning and worth investigating. But this is one of many instances of the scale of an issue clearly being exaggerated.
Moreover, it’s been hard not to notice the usual moral-panic symbiosis in full effect: the prolonged scare has translated into heightened profits for media companies, and aggressive calls for increased powers of censorship and enforcement for government, ironically to control the spread of “fake news.”
What Stanley Cohen described over fifty years ago was a pale preview of what was to come. Cohen saw a primitive effort by cash-hungry tabloids to slap simplistic, symbolic labels on “deviant” groups.
The tabloids were highly effective in creating an “ick” factor around their Mod and Rocker villains, even stripping them of sympathetic characteristics they had in real life, like working-class backgrounds. Without public defenders, media audiences were free to despise them without restraint, and embellish their anti-portraits in their heads.
In America in the eighties and nineties there were usually people to counter such public panics. For every Tipper Gore, there was a Frank Zappa or Dee Snider appearing for the defense.
In our new cleaved and atomized landscape, those brakes are gone. Every demographic has its own folk devils, who go undefended.
Conservative media long ago fixated on libs, commies, terrorists, Islamicists, tax-and-spenders, feminazis, and countless others. No one shows up on Fox to plead for context.
#Resistance media now has devils of its own: deplorables, white supremacists, Trumpites, Bernie Bros, neo-Naderites, false equivalencers, dirtbag-lefters, and countless others.
Even the hated subgroups have developed their own demons, from normies to Hillbots to never-Trumpers and the “deep state.”
Without any way to put a brake on such passions, the new normal will be coexisting, dueling panics: the caravan versus Russiagate, “the beginning of the end” versus “How the Left lost its mind,” Breitbart versus The Palmer Report. Few audiences of any of these outlets will realize they’re engaged in similar behaviors to those of hated antagonists.
The only constant will be more and more authoritarian solutions. In the social media age, we can scare you as never before. Which means politicians will have an easier time obtaining permission for censorship, surveillance, immigration bans, and other expanded powers.
This is the major departure from the Manufacturing Consent age. In 1985, the popular demons were objects of universal terror, usually an external threat – Soviets, Sandinistas, the AIDS virus.
Today pockets of media consumers demonize one another, calling for dueling crackdowns. We have become our own worst enemies, and the longer the cycles play out, the more authoritarian will be our world.
One last note. One of the reasons this trend is worsening has to do with class changes in this business (ironically, this is the subject of this coming week’s chapter).
The old days were obviously no panacea. Reporters until recently almost uniformly were white men, which had an obvious deleterious effect on journalism.
However, back in the day, reporters did tend to come from a different class than the people they reported on in government. A newspaperman in the forties or fifties socially was somewhere between a plumber and the administrator of a typing school. Often he was not college-educated.
Celebrated radio man Walter Winchell worked for a newspaper called “The Graphic” early in his career. Legend has it he was asked in those days if he worked at a newspaper. He supposedly joked in reply: “Yeah, but don’t tell my mother. She still thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” Might be an apocryphal story, but it gives a clue about where the newspaperman was class-wise back then.
Meanwhile the worthies who established the OSS and later the CIA were almost exclusively products of the Ivy League. The cliches about the Bushes bringing their goofball Skull and Bones sensibility to secret service governance were true. The secret agent was a silver spoon creature.
There was therefore a natural antipathy – at least a little – between some reporters and the self-appointed philosopher-kings who worked in secret agencies and spent their days deciding what the world map would look like.
That antipathy is gone today. Reporters, especially national ones, often come from the same schools as FBI and spy chiefs, and they worship the big brains at Langley. There’s an obsession with credentials and resumes that would have made reporters of the Sy Hersh school puke.
So when unnamed “officials” with secret clearances call reporters today, reporters wet themselves. They’ll print anything they’re told, and they don’t even need to be bribed or intimidated into doing it. This is a major reason these unconfirmable stories are so easy to place now.
The press used to be at least a bit of a tough crowd. Now, it’s a laugh track, and the joke is on us.
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