James Morrison
Anatomising Britain’s rolling juvenile moral panic(s): an investigation into the influence of the UK news media on contemporary attitudes and behaviours towards children.
Outline: Recent decades have witnessed intensified public concern about the wellbeing of British children. Numerous studies point towards dramatically increased parental anxieties since the 1970s about their vulnerability to extra-familial threats such as dangerous drivers and predatory paedophiles – with several demonstrating how these fears have translated into parental curbs on children’s freedoms. In parallel, the past 20 years have seen a revival of public and media discourse about the threat juveniles themselves (supposedly) pose to civil society. Yet, while several studies have grappled with the contradictions inherent in this positioning of children as both prey and predator, few have analysed the connections – and tensions - between these dual ‘panics’ by examining both empirically.
This thesis aims to investigate how the narratives underpinning this ‘double-sided’ juvenile moral panic are constructed, sustained and (occasionally) challenged in a late modern media setting. The central hypothesis is that the news media remains a primary definer of these narratives, but that any assumption about ‘media-to-audience’ effects has become more problematic in an age when the output of conventional news organisations is increasingly shaped (and contested) by audiences themselves - through blog-posts, online discussion boards and other forms of user-generated content.
Central to the thesis is the question of which societal force(s) exert the most decisive influence on public discourse about these twin panics: political elites, law enforcement agencies, opinion-leaders/moral entrepreneurs, ordinary citizens, or the media. Equally crucial is the question of how the crystallising moments which revive these recurring panics come about. To help answer these questions, a multi-level methodology will be used to illuminate the increasingly two-way dialogue and information flow between news sources, news media, and news audiences. This will combine textual analysis of print and online newspaper content; participant-observation of reporters in a newsroom context and/or interviews with journalists and news sources; virtual ethnographic observations of audience responses to ‘breaking’ panic stories; and focus-group research with adults and children.
Publications/conference papers
Claims-makers versus counter claims-makers: new sites of civic conflict in the construction and contestation of moral panics through the news and social media (paper to be delivered at Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group’s annual conference at Bournemouth University, November 2011).
Essential Public Affairs for Journalists (2nd edition) (2011), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spin, Smoke-filled Rooms, and the Decline of Council Reporting by Local Newspapers: The Slow Demise of Town Hall Transparency (2011), in A. Charles and G. Stewart (eds) The End of Journalism: News in the Twenty-First Century, pp.193-211. Oxford: Peter Lang (paper originally delivered at the Political Studies Association Annual Conference, 2010).
James Morrison is a freelance journalist, writer and trainer, and a senior lecturer in Journalism and Public Affairs at Kingston University. Prior to training as a lecturer he was a full-time news journalist working for a succession of organisations, including the Independent on Sunday, Daily Mail, and the Press Association.