Audience

Audience

Moral Panic

Moral panic is the feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. The Media overreact to an aspect of behaviour which may be seen as a challenge to existing social norms. However, the media response and representation of that behaviour actually helps to define it, communicate it and portrays it as a model for outsiders to observe and adopt.

So the moral panic by society represented in the media fuels further socially unacceptable behaviour. A moral panic sends society in to mass hysteria over a particular issue or event that occurs. The public believe that whatever is reported upon is occurring everywhere.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The hypodermic needle theory implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behaviour change.

Several factors contributed to this strong effects theory of communication, including:

• The fast rise and popularisation of radio and television.
• The emergence of the persuasion industries, such as advertising and propaganda
• The Payne Fund studies in the 1930s, which focused on the impact of motion pictures on children.
• Hitler's monopolisation of the mass media during WWII to unify the German public behind the Nazi party.

Media Effect Theory
Media effect theory is how media can affect society and how society affects the media. Some negative implications of this theory are when people do 'copycat murders', i.e. when a teenage boy murdered his best friend in 2004, the game 'Manhunt' was banned in the UK, because the murder was styled upon a murder within the game.

After the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, one common view was that the violent actions perpetrated by the shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, were due to violent influences in entertainment, specifically those in the music of Marilyn Manson.