Goode and Yehuda RQ
1. What is the difference between a moral panic and a moral threat?
Generally, moral panic is defined as "the outbreak of moral concern over a supposed threat from an agent of corruption that is out of proportion to its actual danger or potential harm." A moral threat in contrast is the exaggerated form of force that appears to endanger or challenge general morals.
2. What are the three major criticisms of moral panics?
The first two center on the difficulty of establishing criteria to measure exaggeration and disproportional representation. The third concerns claims about amoral panics in the co-called risky society. Exaggeration through the media attempts to grab societies attention and create the moral panic. However, if research is done about the subject, one can find that the media exaggerates numbers instead of providing the actual facts about the matter. When it comes to disproportional representation, critics have challenged the two elements - concern and threat - and have found that they are incommensurable. In other words, "it is impossible to verify the claim that a given level of concern is out of proportion to a given level of threat, since on cannot be measured or weighed against the other" (Goode and Yehuda 26). Certain conditions or behaviors and threats are so implausible that any concerns they generate are by definition disproportionate to their supposed harm. Lastly, the foundation for moral panics has rested on moralization and folk devil construction. Threats in the past were based more on morality. However, with the development of technological threats, our concerns and panics no longer focus on morality. Instead, today's enemy is unbounded, incalculable, faceless, and amoral.
3. What are the two models of moral panic analysis discussed by the authors? What do they advocate going forward?
The two models of moral panic analysis are: the processual model, and the attributional model. The processual model focuses mainly on the dynamics, development, and sequence of events of historical cases of claims about particular threats. The attributional model also focuses on claims making in moral panics but provides a standard set of measurable attributes to apply to all moral panics. Both models of moral panic dovetail neatly with the contextual constructionist perspective. Going forward, they argue that we no longer live in a unified, monolithic, consensual society, one in which a given threat strikes fear into the hearts of all members. Today, the society is fragmented into diverse cliques, factions, niches, categories, sectors, etc.