Moral Panics

Throughout the course of history, the ever-increasing ubiquity of the media landscape has increased the prevalence of moral panics. In a society where bad news sells, the media exacerbates and fuels moral panics in order to gain public interest and therefore viewership. With increased viewership, comes a larger market and thus an opportunity for advertisers to reach a wider audience of consumers.
In Australia, politicians condemn refugees, as they perceive them as a threat to society’s values.

‘A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order’ (Stanley, 1972). Moral panics are said to occur when ‘a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerge to become defined

In the lead up to a 2001 federal election, the Howard government released allegations that asylum seekers were ‘throwing’ children overboard as a stunt to be rescued and granted access to Australia. (Rawat, 2013)
However no one was ever thrown overboard, in actuality they were on board a sinking vessel. Originally the circulating ‘Children Overboard’ image was supposed to show the navy assisting the affected families to safety but was later manipulated by the government to reflect the danger and threats of asylum seekers, who were willing to throw children and women overboard in a ploy to seek asylum. This is a prime example that sees the government as the ‘moral entrepreneurs’ attempting to conjure up fear through employed fear-mongering tactics. Corderoy stresses how easily people are influenced by the media they consume, and thus how hard it is to resist adopting similar views to the ‘political parties who take extreme positions on those issues tend to gain popularity’ (Corderoy, 2012). Print media later exacerbated the image of the children overboard and the negative attitude towards refugees by publishing the photo with fabricated headlines and versions of the event that made refugees out to be nasty ‘criminals’ and ‘queue jumpers’, ‘This type of media coverage actually makes people more scared of, and more opposed to, refugees’ (Corderoy, 2012). This demonstrates and acts as a historical reminder of how easily the same event/medium can be received, manipulated and thus misconstrued in different ways. The ‘Children Overboard Affair’ emphasises print media’s role in the formation of discourses involving refugees and asylum seekers and the subsequent propagated racial anxiety created as a result of