7.TV news

In my opinion news are all about being bad. Crimes, problems, politics....Only sometimes we can hear about birth of a rare animal in the ZOO, or some artistic events.

I would like to examine BBC web page:
The first headline is about food crisis. Top stories are:

• Power-sharing call for Zimbabwe

• Mozambique police 'kill at will'

• Many dead in Afghan suicide blast

What is interesting I found this:

Massacre at Virginia Tech

One year after the United States' worst mass-shooting, This World investigates why the killer carried out the attack.

According to The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology moral panic is:

'an extreme social response to the perception that the moral condition of society is deteriorating at a calamitous pace. Most often such panics are promoted by mass media reports reinforced by officials in various institutions such as the state. Numerous sociologists, especially in Britain, have interpreted moral panic as a device used to distract public attention from underlying social problems and justify increased social control over the working class and other potentially rebellious segments of society. From this perspective, for example, the moral panic over street muggings in Britain during the 1970s can be viewed as part of a political effort to weaken the welfare state at the expense of lowerand working-class people who were the object of increased police control. In this way, resistance among minorities and the poor was perceived not as political or class conflict but as individual lawlessness requiring repressive measures.

The concept of moral panic has also been applied to trends in youth culture, reactions to AIDS and illegal drug use, and hooliganism in Britain.'

It is said that in the USA Bush and the government are trying to maintain panic, to make people behave in a way they want. Without that, they couldn't have sent an army to e.g. Afghanistan. These are the stages of moral panic:

1. Someone or something is defined as a threat to values or interests;
2. This threat is depicted in an easily recognizable form by the media;
3. There is a rapid build up of public concern;
4. There is a response from authorities or opinion makers;
5. The panic recedes or results in social changes.

(http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol8is3/killingbeck.html)

Living in the never-ending fear is stressful, and may cause more violence. As a reader of media, we should be conscious, and aware of what is created by media.