Moral Panic Case Study

What is a moral panic? Moral panic is a term used to describe media presentation of something that has happened that the public will react to in a panicky manner. Moral panic has a tendency to exaggerate statistics and to create a bogey-man, known as a folk-devil in sociological terms. In recent years moral panic and media presentation have covered a wide-ranging number of topics from HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s to asylum seekers into the UK in the 2000’s. Moral panic goes back as far as World War One when the wartime government used the media to portray the Germans in a certain manner in the hope of provoking a response. The same happened in World War Two. In this case, the media did not have to portray Hitler in a certain manner as the public

This case illustrates the concept of moral panic in a positive tone because the people actually got what they wanted because of their protesting and the correct people on their side. Another way this case illustrates the concept of moral panic is because a man by the name of Museveni said “Homosexuality = AIDS = 100%,” declared one placard, while Museveni instructed the audience that: “The mouth is for eating, it is not for gonorrhoea.”(Hodes 2014). By Museveni saying these words people that follow him would be considered to be in a moral panic.
Lastly, the case of the opposition to transgender restroom rights in Houston and homosexuality in Uganda illustrate the concept of moral panic because anything that has to do with homosexuality people tend to react in a “panicky manner”. In both situations there was a group of people that believed in a certain situation and wanted reasonable results. In one of the cases the people got what they wanted and in the other case they had to settled until someone comes up with a moral panic that will change everyone’s