Media and Moral Panic

733 Words3 Pages
Bath Salts, Moral Panic, and the Media Moral panic is a concept that exists due to the relationship between the media and society; when the mass media, usually led by press, define a group or act as ‘deviant’ and focus on it to the exclusion of almost everything else (Jewkes, p. 74). In recent news, synthetic cathinone, colloquially known as bath salts became an issue that developed into moral panic, mainly due to the media sensationalizing one incident down in Florida. The story went like this: Rudy Eugene, seemingly without provocation, gnawed off a homeless man’s face in some sort of zombie-like cannibalism you’d only see in a movie, even possessing superhuman strength after being shot by a police officer. The reason? Bath salts – or so they claimed. As it would turn out, toxicology results released showed only marijuana in Rudy’s system, which may not have been actively present during the time of the assault. Despite this, the story of bath salts persisted because WFOR, a CBS affiliate based out of Miami, ran with a false story. With the help of the ‘actors’-- police, politicians, journalist, and experts -- the making of this moral panic soon made its way to the general public. Armando Aguilar, the president of Miami's Fraternal Order of Police was widely cited as claiming that Eugene must have been under the influence of drugs, probably some kind of "bath salts." (Sullum). Paul Adams, a local emergency room physician, does not seem to have explicitly blamed Eugene's crime on bath salts; however, WFOR used him to confirm and amplify Aguilar's unfounded speculation, treating the two as interchangeable experts. As the story picked up, so did America’s fear of a street drug so bad it would turn users into flesh eating killers. Almost overnight, the attention to a ‘drug’ with nearly no research on it became the new evil of the drug world. There was a societal

More about Media and Moral Panic

Open Document