Glossary

Moral panic

When a group, a phenomenon or a new technology is suddenly singled out as a threat to society’s values or children’s safety – and the reaction is far bigger than the real threat. The term was popularised by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).

Folk devil

Cohen’s word for the group that gets the blame: the greasers, the punks, the role-players, “teenagers with phones”.

The five signs

The sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda described five signs of a moral panic: concern (many people are worried), hostility (towards a group that is singled out), consensus (a widespread belief that the threat is real), disproportionality (the reaction is bigger than the threat) and volatility (the panic flares up and disappears quickly).

Panic meter

How dangerous it was thought to be while the panic lasted, from 1 (a slightly furrowed brow) to 5 (parliament, television and the church in united terror).

Reality meter

How dangerous it turned out to be, according to what we know today, from 1 (harmless) to 5 (as dangerous as they said, or worse).

Overblown

The panic meter minus the reality meter. +4 means a seriously inflated alarm. A negative value means the danger was underestimated.

Statuses

• Blown over – the alarm didn’t hold up.
• Partly justified – there was something in it, but not as much as was claimed.
• It was true – the warnings turned out to be right.
• Ongoing – the verdict isn’t in.

Front page

The newspaper’s poster outside the newsagent’s, with the day’s biggest headlines. On Moralpanik you make your own: five panics, 100 per cent worry.

The Golden Front Page

The editors’ annual award for the moral panic of the century – the one most inflated compared with reality.