Media representation of crime - Moral Panic?

While I was doing some research about the relationship between media representations of crime and moral panic, I found this interesting video on Youtube that is worth of watching:

As defined by Cohen, moral panic is when the mass media delineate a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges as a threat to societal values and interest, often presented in a stereotypical way. Marsh and Melville (Chapter 3) also suggested that media actively shape citizens’ views of social life by providing only certain types of information and by subjectively framing issues in ways that lead the public to adopt particular beliefs.

Acting as claims maker, the media’s duty is to inform the public of the most concerned social problems, those that are often unfamiliar subjects to the average citizen. However, the way in which claims makers report on problems and what information they choose to report is often disfigured by biases, ignorance and many hidden agendas. The effect of such wrongdoing is that public fear is often created about issues that do not directly threaten majority of the public.

Williams and Dickinson (from the weekly reading) documented that the media’s tendency to focus on violent crime has led to a poorly informed and frightened public as resulted from the quantity and quality of the news media’s reporting of crime.

“If it bleeds, it leads.”

Profits are made when television and print news attract large proportion of audiences by satisfying the public’s curiosity with violence. The way that information is presented within a problem frame not only creates and amplifies public’s fear but in which became a public concern in regards to the danger and risk produced towards policing the society.

Cohen lists responses to school violence as one of seven clusters of moral panics, given the fact that responses to social problems are exaggerated and expressed in terms of moral outrage. He also illustrates how the response to school violence is a good example of moral panic as it involves suitable folk devils and sympathetic victims driven by the widespread concern in regards to school violence, accelerated response by dramatic cases, and the horror of the event elicits fear of widespread victimization.

Media’s role in shaping fears, capture the public’s imagination on the widespread of victimization rather than the actual crime rates exists. As Cohen states, it is essential to evaluate the content of the news articles published in order to understand what they articulate, the degree of accuracy in relates to reality, and what messages and images are trying to convey.

The Moral Panic Wheel

Controversially professor Ferguson from Texas A&M’s Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice uses this Moral Panic Wheel to suggest that there is no one group or factor responsible for moral panics.

If such theory is factual, then who is responsible?