Conspiracy or consensus? Reconsidering the moral panic

Reconsidering Journal of Communication the Moral Panic Inquiry Carol A. Stabile Conspiracy or Consensus? Reconsidering the Moral Panic This article considers Policing the Crisis’ continued significance some three decades into the crime wave that began in the United States. Specifically, this article uses Policing the Crisis as a springboard for examining the moral panic and crisis as frameworks for understanding media coverage of crime and social responses to that coverage. Policing the Crisis was published at a transitional moment in the development of cultural studies, after which what Gramsci described as a necessary balance between economism and ideologism shifted perceptibly toward the latter or what Gramsci described as “an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element.” The text thus offers insight into the relationship between cultural studies and political economy of the media, at the same time illustrating a trajectory not pursued within cultural studies. To get at these issues, the article examines two overlapping areas of concern: the role of public opinion in gauging consent and the role of institutions and coercion. First published in its entirety in 1978, now unfortunately long out of print, Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978) was one of the most significant texts to emerge from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, inspiring many studies of moral panics and influencing at least a generation of scholars (see, e.g., Watney 1987; Jenkins 1998). It remains, almost a quarter of a century after its publication, perhaps the finest example of collaborative work in the humanities. The point of this article, however, is not to canonize Policing the Crisis (1978) but to consider its continued significance some three decades into the crime wave that began in the United States. Specifically, this article uses Policing the Crisis as a springboard for examining the moral panic and crisis as frameworks for understanding media coverage of crime and social responses to that coverage. Policing the Crisis was published at a transitional moment in the development of cultural studies, after which what Gramsci (1989) described as a necessary balance between economism and ideologism shifted perceptibly toward the latter or what Gramsci described as “an exaggeration of Author’s Note: I am grateful to Carrie Rentschler for her generous reading of this article. Journal of Communication Inquiry 25:3 (July 2001): 258-278 © 2001 Sage Publications, Inc. 258 Reconsidering the Moral Panic 259 the voluntarist and individual element” (p. 178). The text thus offers insight into the relationship between cultural studies and political economy of the media, at the same time illustrating a trajectory not pursued within cultural studies. To get at these issues, the article examines two overlapping areas of concern: the role of public opinion in gauging consent and the role of institutions and coercion. A Run on the Bank: Causality and the Moral Panic The notion of the moral panic borrows from the realm of finance to explain ideologically motivated behavior. A frequently cited passage from Policing the Crisis (1978) describes a moral panic as occurring when the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when “experts,” in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk “with one voice” of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress “sudden and dramatic” increases (in numbers involved or events) and “novelty,” above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic. (P. 16) The true gauge of the moral panic appears in an overreaction that is “out of all proportion to any level of actual threat” (p. 29). Policing the Crisis’ intervention, Hall et al. write, lies in shifting attention from the deviant act (mugging) alone “to the relation between the deviant act and the reaction of the public and the control agencies to the act” (p. 17). How does this analogy between the economic and moral panic work? An economic panic occurs when rumors of a bank’s (or banks’) instability causes a run on the bank, wherein investors withdraw their money, thereby insuring the bank’s collapse. While that which motivates investors’ behavior may be indeterminate—after all, as Marx would remind us that it is faith in money and the commodity form that keeps the whole operation afloat—their behavior is directly observable and the immediate cause of the bank’s collapse. The moral panic is said to function along the same lines. Rumor, mass media hype, and the institutional response to these cause people to panic about crime, which in turn causes them to support more stringent law and order measures. The resulting displacement, according to Hall et al. (1978), “Between threat and reaction, between what is perceived and what that is a perception of” (p. 29) is a moral panic. This chain of causality, however, rests on a number of unexamined assumptions, of both material and ideological significance. In the first place, the channels of communication through which the threat of crime is communicated are varied at the level of production: quite different media are 260 Journal of Communication Inquiry implicated; while in terms of reception, public opinion emerges not only as a response to the mass media but also from what Hall et al. describe as “The interplay of knowledge, rumours, folk-lore and opinions” (p. 135). Nevertheless, the interplay to which they refer is assumed rather than proven, for they assume a certain transparency and taken-for-grantedness when it comes to how audiences respond to law and order news and how audiences act on that response. In fairness to Policing the Crisis (1978), the bulk of the analysis is devoted to the largely discursive production of the moral panic. Yet, throughout the text, there is a conflation of “the public” and “control agencies” (p. 17) and an assumption that “the public at large” was panicked by “the dominant definition of mugging” (pp. 29-30). But does crime coverage cause people to be more fearful, as George Gerbner (1994) and his associates would have us believe or as Policing the Crisis implies? Unlike a run on a bank, where the link between cause (rumors of impending bank failure) and effect (withdrawal of funds) can be clearly observed, too many complex variables are at work in the case of crime coverage and its effects. Orson Welles’1938 Mercury Theater broadcast of The War of the Worlds offers an instructive contrast, as it was the first—and perhaps best studied—case of a panic generated by broadcast media. Newspapers, wire services, and police were literally swamped with phone calls from terrified citizens during the broadcast. People called their priests to seek confession, some listeners believed that it was a German invasion, and throughout the country, people took to the road to escape from Martians, who were said to be sending out rays that set barns, cars, and forests on fire (Cantril and Allport 1941, 53; Barnouw 1968, 87). The War of the Worlds, in which a single broadcast on a single medium caused people to panic, is an exceptional case. Normally, fear is a notoriously difficult emotion to pin down or measure. Like dreams, to a large degree, fear is subject to condensation and displacement. She who fears, for example, may not be willing—or able—to identify the source of her fears, particularly when that fear may be understood as racist.1 Problems with interpretation are compounded by quantitative questions. How much do people fear crime, particularly in relationship to other social fears and anxieties? How can fear of crime be distinguished from these other fears? How do such studies account for race, class, and gender differences (for example, surveys show that African Americans identify the police as a central cause of fear)? (see Russell 1998, 8).2 What instruments can be used to measure these fears? Problems with conceptualizations of fear are exacerbated by the actions then ascribed to such fears, particularly public support for repressive policies. Broadly speaking, it is assumed that people give their consent to the official reaction to the threat—that is, people agree that strict measures are called for in response to the crisis at hand, whether this response entails crime policies or Reconsidering the Moral Panic 261 stricter rules in schools—and that the moral panic produces “an apparent cross-class consensus on crime” (Hall et al. 1978, 139). While consensus can be documented among producers of the media and the institutions involved, consensus among producers does not necessarily translate into consensus among consumers.3 Hall et al. (1978) thus are vague when it comes to identifying the nonelite proponents of the backlash. At one point in the argument, they describe, These people [who] have never had the upper-class rewards of wealth or the working-class rewards of solidarity to compensate them for the sacrifices they have made to compete and succeed. All the rewards they have ever had are “moral” ones. They have maintained the traditional standards of moral and social conduct; they have identified—over-identified—with “right thinking” in every sphere of life; and they have come to regard themselves as the backbone of the nation, the guardians of its traditional wisdom. (P. 163) While I certainly would not argue that fractions of the dominated classes do indeed support law and order policies, I do question the evidence for consensus, as well as large-scale “popular” or “public” support for specific law and order campaigns. Even Policing the Crisis demonstrates a sense of uneasiness when it comes to “the public” at issue, as well as some epistemological confusion about the referent(s) for this: on page 7, they refer to “public interest,” later to “public concern” (p. 38), “public voice,” “public idiom,” (p. 63), “public image” (p. 118), and “public opinion” (p. 120). “Public” consequently has the status of an amorphous modifier with no direct referent. Although Hall et al. (1978) criticize official uses of statistics and “public opinion” in places, elsewhere, they rely on official constructions of public opinion (and the traditional surveying devices that produce it) to gauge public support for anticrime measures. That is, to put it bluntly, they assume at a deep level that publicity is easily related to both opinion and popularity. To advance their argument about the moral panic and subsequent public reaction, Hall et al. do not seriously investigate the industrialization of opinionation.4 Consequently, there is no acknowledgment that opinion itself is an industrial product rather than some authentic expression of public sentiment. Hall et al. (1978) assert, The social communication through which public opinion is formed consists of everything, from conversations between neighbours, discussion at street-corners or in the pub; rumour, gossip, speculation, “inside dope,” debate between members of the family at home, expressions of opinions and views in private meetings, and so on, all the way up to the more formal levels, with which the mass media intersect. The organising of “public opinion” takes place at all these levels of social interchange. (P. 129) 262 Journal of Communication Inquiry Yet, despite references that gesture toward opinion formation at less formal, extrainstitutional levels, they never offer research or insight into the construction of public opinion in unofficial venues, assuming instead that there is a structural homology between these informal channels of social communication and the formal channels that are monopolized by elites. Defying the laws of gravity and the logic of capitalist media, the model implies that information and opinions trickle up. Since the authors offer no investigation or research on the organization of public opinion among the dominated, we must infer that it is homologous to the organization of public opinion among the dominant. I should make it clear here that I am not advancing a critique of false consciousness of the sort that was to become ascendant in cultural studies in the 1980s. This argument runs as follows: audiences are not passive dupes who blindly consume information but are active and often resistant makers of meaning.5 I have criticized this argument elsewhere, but it is worth emphasizing that when it comes to the dubious arena of “opinions,” it seems to me that when people only have access to propaganda and misinformation (and the manipulation of statistics throughout the War on Crime and the War on Drugs exemplifies both of these), the critic has to be in the position to say that the resultant opinion(s) are just plain wrong, whether these opinions are voiced by a politician, student, or acquaintance (Stabile 1995). Take, for example, a person’s “opinion” that the death penalty actually deters violent crime: a belief so objectively wrong that only the most cretinous of politicians dares to use it these days. On the other hand, and given the widely shared suspicion of the media shared by many groups of people, a safer assumption to make about public opinion is that the vast majority of television viewers do not trust what they see and hear on the screen. Consequently, responses to crime coverage, and perspectives on crime, may vary considerably. But little work in cultural studies examines actual opinions. So rather than engaging in a debate about false consciousness based on some abstract sense that people might feel this way, what I am getting at is a methodological issue relevant to much work in cultural studies. Pierre Bourdieu has described this as “the uses of the people,” which can take the shape of elitism (and some versions of false consciousness) or populism (as in uncritical celebrations of resistance, negotiation, and other variations on consumerist agency) (see also Bourdieu’s 1993 “Public Opinion Does Not Exist”). While critical of myriad social constructions, intellectuals retain little of that criticism in relation to their own mobilizations of terms such as “the people,” “the popular,” and “the working-class.” All too often, we rely on mass media accounts of opinion or popularity or some vague intuition cobbled together from various sources. The industrial production of the representation of public opinion reproduces itself in critical work that relies on interpretive methods alone, where “the people” or “the popular” functions as support for Reconsidering the Moral Panic 263 the author’s own opinion (which lacks evidential support). Whether such uncritical uses of the people take the shape of elitism or populism, either way, they reproduce quite interested constructions of opinion, supported by no independent investigation or research.6 The Iran-Contra hearings of 1987 offer an important example of this very problem. In an article on Stuart Hall, Jeremiah Creedon (1987) observed, “Oliver North’s testimony taught us little about the Iran-contra scandal, but it did reiterate two old truths: one, that television is a powerful medium; and two, that many Americans will react with fear toward all things labeled ‘Marxist’” (p. 29). Creedon goes on to claim that North “stirred new support for the Nicaraguan ‘freedom fighters.’” These statements mirror what the press said about Oliver North’s televised appearances: Individual viewers were inundating North and congressmen with letters, telegrams, and phone calls of support, and the American people consider him a national hero. In a word, “Olliemania” was sweeping the country. However, as historian David Thelen (1996) points out in Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television, public response was much more complex than the picture transmitted by the news. Shocked by media accounts of Olliemania, Thelen asked Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Select Committee, if he could review the letters he had received during the investigation. As Thelen recounts, “So completely had I accepted the media’s reports of Olliemania that nothing in my thirty years of practicing history prepared me for what I discovered as I read letter after letter, some five thousand” (p. 7). Not only did Thelen discover that press reports were wrong about what such letters said, in reviewing the polls that had also been used to underwrite North’s alleged popularity, he found “great popular skepticism, even fear, about North” (p. 8). The commonsense understanding expressed by Creedon and many other Leftleaning intellectuals of the televised Senate hearings (especially public response to Oliver North’s testimony) was derived entirely from the mass media’s representation of the situation, one that depicted (both visually and thematically) overwhelming support for North. By accepting that Olliemania was in fact real, intellectuals further legitimized it. That they did so tells us much about intellectuals’ own opinion(s) about the public, albeit little else. So while Policing the Crisis provides an incisive analysis of the production of “mugging,” when Hall et al. (1978) attempt to transfer this theory of production to a theory of reception and/or consent, they reproduce the institutional and ideological mandates of the very institutions they would criticize, in part by accepting the mass media’s construction of public opinion. For media critics, to take constructions of public opinion as evidence of consent is both intellectually and politically dangerous, whether these constructions are based on polling or the passage of legislation. In the first place, as previously mentioned, this ignores the fact that the polling industry is indeed an industry and that its 264 Journal of Communication Inquiry practices therefore are structured by its economic and political interests. The industrialization of opinionation transforms representations of opinions into commodites. A conservative organization, or a liberal one for that matter, is not going to hire a polling agency to perform a survey that will undermine the argument for which they intend to use it. Using the passage of legislation as evidence of widespread popularity is similarly problematic. Take the case of the 1992 Crime Bill in the United States, for which the media repeatedly claimed overwhelming public support. As media scholars, how can we assess the veracity of this claim? This was no referendum on which citizens directly voted. And since Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly supported the Crime Bill, choice was not an element in elections either. Moreover, how can people be said to have consented to a bill about which there was no significant public debate?7 Polling data is further interpreted and reported by journalists, who insert the data into already existing frameworks of interpretation (think of Reagan’s reputation as “the Great Communicator,” “The War on Crime,” or “Olliemania”). As Christopher Hitchens (1997) has pointed out, that Reagan was a liar is a statement of fact, that he was “the Great Communicator” is an opinion and an ungrounded one at that (which required that the press overlook Reagan’s not infrequent narcoleptic episodes, as well as those moments when he completely lost his train of thought and gazed blankly at the camera or interviewer). The framing of issues is thus intended to marginalize explanations or information that might contradict the larger framework. Despite the claims of media pundits and politicians, we need to question whether law and order measures enjoy the widespread support claimed for them. For instance, and in contrast to the allegedly punitive mood of the American public, Doris Graber’s (1980) research found that those surveyed “exhibited far stronger human concerns about [both] criminals and victims than was reflected in the media stories,” but “While public attitudes are encouraging on that score, media practices are apt to be a countervailing influence” (p. 74). Graber further discovered “public beliefs that poverty and crime are linked,” predicting that “programs to reduce poverty among population groups with high crime incidence should be able to win wide public support” (p. 129). Indeed, she continued, “In an era when there is general reluctance to maintain or even increase welfare obligations, making the crime-poverty link explicit may aid in passage of programs that might otherwise fail” (p. 129). Obviously, in the antiwelfare state climate of the 1980s, this link was never pursued by either journalists or politicians. Finally, surveying instruments aim for broad generalizations that can be easily quantified and numerically represented. The goal being homogenization, polls are not intended to represent or capture any of the heterogeneity of diverse populations. Indeed, one of the functions of law and order news is to Reconsidering the Moral Panic 265 deny such diversity and to silence the dissenting voices that accompany real political diversity.8 If the first danger involves not recognizing the industrialization of opinion, then the second danger involves the emptiness of the concept of “opinion,” particularly in the United States, the land where everyone has the right to her own opinion, however shallow or ill-informed. Just as opinion is not identical with consent, so opinion is not identical with an argument. In fact, we might say that “public opinion” functions rather like the trope of the silent majority: it signifies only insofar as politicians and journalists want it to signify within the context of a given argument. All too frequently, it is used to fill in gaps in the logic of arguments, and it ultimately serves as a prophylactic against political or intellectual accountability. After all, in the marketplace of ideas, how can an opinion be wrong, especially when it is an opinion attributed to a majority? Insofar as the concept of a moral panic proceeds from the unexamined belief that a given population, having been made fearful by media coverage, has consented to the remedies proposed by elites, it relies on elite constructions of public opinion, as well as consent.9 At the same time, the moral panic may reproduce these constructions of public opinion by not considering the existence of arguments and ideas that lie outside the representational limits of surveys or the ideological frameworks used by politicians and journalists. For instance, in the execution frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s, advocates of the death penalty were frequently featured on newscasts, especially those dealing with specific executions. Rarely were opponents of the death penalty featured to the same extent. Similarly, polls suggesting that a majority of Americans would prefer sentencing those convicted of murder to life without parole rather than to death were downplayed. The resultant narratives about capital punishment did not capture any of the complexity of arguments that operate outside a pro–death penalty framework or at less formal levels of debate. For academics to refer to unilateral public support for the death penalty was to reproduce the invisibility of counterarguments. In the end, the notion of causality underlying the moral panic—which implies that fearful people consent to law and order policies—substitutes the media’s simulacrum of consent for its reality. Although Donna Haraway (1992), Susan Jeffords (1989), and others have identified images as varied as jaguars, POWs, and fetuses as the perfect grounds for conservative ventriloquist acts (especially insofar as the object represented can never speak back), Nixon’s “silent majority,” which was the crucial component for his derailing of the War on Poverty and launching of the War on Crime, was the immediate prototype for these. For Nixon and those who followed him (liberal and conservative alike), the beauty of the silent majority was that it was in fact silent and could thus be filled with whatever sentiment conservatives deemed fit. In addi- 266 Journal of Communication Inquiry tion, the silent majority could be deployed as a vehicle for transparently whitesupremacist ideologies without any individual actually uttering the overtly racist and segregationist viewpoints that had proved to be unpopular during the Civil Rights Movement. And no one could be held accountable for such sentiments, not the politicians, who were “merely” the mouthpieces for the silent majority, nor the media, whose decisions to give so much publicity to racist sentiments were legitimated by the ideology of free speech. When scholars accept a construction of popular support for stringent lawand-order measures, we wind up reproducing dominant ideologies of “the people” as an ignorant, monolithic mass, incapable of any but the most reactionary agency, vulnerable to the mass media’s most conservative messages, and utterly homogenous. People may not agree, in fact, with law and order policies, but the appearance of consent in the media may have what Bourdieu (1996) NEW REFERENCE? describes as “reality effects” (p. 21). Specifically, the appearance of consent may lead members of the public (not to mention the media and politicians) to behave as if that consent did exist. To accept that Olliemania was sweeping the country not only was to take a profoundly dismal view of one’s countrywomen but also was to assign dissent and protest an ever more marginal and invisible position in U.S. society. In what may well be the ultimate irony of cultural studies scholarship in the 1980s, scholars imagined audiences capable of consumerist and textualist resistance in terms of their consumption of romances, television programs, and film, but when it came to politics, scholars saw only Thatcherite and Reaganite blocs. Consensual Relations: The Media, the FBI, and the Criminalization of Dissent You know that this right to dissent is the whole issue of the campaign. Heaven knows that this country is built on responsible dissent. It’s built on the right to disagree without fear with the established authorities. It’s built on the right of the free press to say what it wants. It’s built on the right of people to go out and demonstrate if they adhere to the law and don’t interfere with the rights of other people to enjoy their lives. All of these things have been laid down by the courts and laid down properly, but it does not include civil disobedience and violence and for that we will never stand. (Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro T. Agnew, ABC Nightly News, 15 October 1968) Another point to be kept in mind is that in political struggle one should not ape the methods of the ruling classes, or one will fall into easy ambushes. (Gramsci 1989, 232) Policing the Crisis (1978) primarily focuses on the putatively consensual processes that led to law and order policies. Hall et al. take pains to avoid any hint of the “conspiratorial” (p. 136), also arguing, Reconsidering the Moral Panic 267 In formally democratic class societies, the exercise of power and the securing of domination ultimately depends, as we have argued, on the equation of popular consent. This is consent, not simply to the interests and purposes but also to the interpretations and representations of social reality generated by those who control the mental, as well as the material, means of social reproduction. A conspiratorial interpretation is not intended here. (P. 219) This defensive posture is counterproductive, particularly in the context of the United States, since it can force scholars to actually overlook evidence of 10 cooperation and intentionality among the ruling classes. Despite evidence of intentionality, scholars engage in some odd contortions to avoid eliciting the dreaded pejorative of conspiracy theory. In large part, this results from a focus on ideologism and the post-Marxism of the Reagan/Thatcher years (which was also an anti-Marxism, although its advocates preferred not to describe it that way). But it also responds to a language through which the Left’s suspicions about government surveillance and repression has historically been dismissed as paranoid and loony. Policing the Crisis (1978) implies that crime and blackness had long been articulated in the United States, but it largely overlooks the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and the wholesale criminalization of blacks that occurred as the 1960s ground to a close. That is to say, the emergence of law and order news in the 1960s involved not scapegoating, as Policing the Crisis puts it, but actively criminalizing dissident populations within the United States. There is an overwhelming body of evidence documenting J. Edgar Hoover’s campaigns against people of color, from Marcus Garvey to Dr. Martin Luther King to the Black Panther Party. We know, for example, that Hoover was almost single-handedly responsible for Garvey’s imprisonment for mail fraud in 1923 and his deportation in 1927, that he ordered the FBI to stop notifying Dr. King about death threats in the early 1960s, that the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program reserved its most repressive tactics for blacks and other people of color. The crime wave that begins in the 1960s thus has its origins in a specifically white supremacist understanding of politics, political activism, and the role of people of color in U.S. society and in the racially motivated, highly coordinated government attack on people of color that followed from such understandings (see Branch 1988, 1998; Churchill and Vander Wall 1988; Garrow 1988; Powers 1983; Schrecker 1998; Swearingen 1995; Theoharis 1978; Theoharis and Cox 1988; Webb 1998). Take the political events of 1968 for example—increasing levels of international and domestic political violence accompanied by increasing levels of repression—which mark what Antonio Gramsci has described as a crisis in hegemony. Unable to maintain control through ideological means (Government “Truth Squads,” sent to college campuses to “explain” the Vietnam War, 268 Journal of Communication Inquiry seemed to only galvanize political opposition), the establishment more frequently resorted to sheer brute suppression, in the visible form of policing and invisible forms of domestic surveillance, for which more public forms of consent and legitimation were unnecessary. As usual, the FBI was to play a crucial, if publicly unacknowledged, role in defining crime and criminality. Hoover was outraged by the social movements of the 1960s, finding them opposed to everything he held dear (racism, homophobia, xenophobia, elitism, capitalism, puling respect for authority, and so forth).11 And by 1968, the Bureau was hoping for an end to a rough seven-year period. Although Hoover had had very cordial relationships with both Republican and Democratic presidents dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Kennedy and Johnson years had been difficult. The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general meant that Hoover could not engage in his preferred habit of submitting reports directly to the White House. His relationship with Robert Kennedy was frosty at best: Robert Kennedy considered the FBI to be “a very dangerous organization,” and he had made clear his intention to integrate the FBI (Branch 1998, 536). Although Hoover’s relationship with Johnson was much better, he disliked Attorney General Ramsey Clark (1970), publicly referring to him as a “jellyfish” (“FBI’s Hoover Scores Ramsey Clark, RFK,” The Washington Post, 17 November 1970; “Hoover Reported Describing Clark as Jellyfish,” The New York Times, 17 November 1970; Ungar 1976, 62).12 In addition, Hoover was nearing the age of mandatory retirement (he turned 70 in 1965), a fact that diminished both his sense of security and his power. Hoover harbored a particularly vicious, personal hatred of Martin Luther King, that was to continue well after the Civil Rights leader’s death in 1968.13 FBI surveillance of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and King apparently began in the late 1950s and information gathered, particularly the bogus claims that associates Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin were communists, was used to gain approval from Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 14 1963 for official, systematic wiretapping of King. Shortly thereafter, Hoover declared King “specifically unfit to receive death warnings” when the FBI became aware of such. While the FBI’s standard practice was to notify potential targets of assassins about death threats (including Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), King was never to receive such notification (Branch, 1998, 198). Instead, he was treated like a criminal and subjected to intensified surveillance by the very agency that was supposed to be protecting him. In 1961, Hoover had secretly authorized the extension of the Counterintelligence Program aimed at the Communist Party to include the Socialist Workers Party, at the same time intensifying monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement. As Theoharis and Cox (1988) point out, Reconsidering the Moral Panic 269 With John F. Kennedy’s election to the Presidency in November of that year, the country began to move away from the politics of antisubversion and instead address the problems of crime, race, and poverty through proposals to promote health, education, and welfare. (P. 325) Accordingly, Hoover “modified his germ-phobic [anticommunist] rhetoric to emphasize a generalized assault on American values” (pp. 327-28). Hoover’s attacks on King increasingly took the shape of attacks on King’s character and values, with racist overtones. In November 1964, shortly before King’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, and during a press conference with Washington, DC, newspaperwomen, Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country” (pp. 355-6).15 Later that month, the FBI mailed a tape made of composite buggings of King’s hotel rooms to Coretta Scott King, along with a letter composed by Assistant Director William Sullivan, calling King “an evil, abnormal beast” and concluding, “You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” On 21 December, Hoover also sent copies of a specially prepared two-page FBI report entitled “Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Personal Conduct” to the White House, Vice President Humphrey, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the heads of the CIA, USIA, and the four military intelligence services. (P. 359) In addition to disseminating slanderous information and reports to prominent government officials and politicians, Hoover used his privileged connections to the media to distribute information. Congress, and conservative legislative supporters, exploited the Congressional Record to attack Hoover’s critics. Hoover’s articles, speeches, reports, testimony, favorable reviews of his books, editorials, laudatory resolutions by local groups, interviews, news items, and feature stories all found their way—many more than once—into the Congressional Record. . . . From 1940 until his death, the volume of Record speeches and insertions on the subject of the Director (overwhelmingly laudatory) dwarfs the coverage of any other single figure in American life. (Donner 1980, 101) During the full-scale campaign to discredit King before the Nobel Award Ceremonies, Cartha DeLoach, FBI liaison to Johnson, offered copies of “a purported FBI microphone surveillance transcript” of King’s sexual activities to Ben Bradlee, then with Newsweek and Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief David Kraslow, while related information, such as transcripts and photographs, was offered to CBS correspondent Dan Rather, The New York Times reporter John Herbers, Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko, Atlanta Constitution editors Ralph McGill and Eugene Patterson, and Augusta 270 Journal of Communication Inquiry Chronicle reporter Lou Harris (Rather 1977, 97; Theoharis and Cox 1988, 357). When Hoover heard that King was planning to meet with Teamsters’ president Jimmy Hoffa, Hoover notified friendly news media in a successful “counterintelligence aim to thwart King from receiving money from the Teamsters” (Theoharis and Cox 1988, 358). The FBI and the media (from film to book publishing to radio and television) have always had an intimate, if complicated, relationship. In terms of the news industry, the FBI had long cultivated friendly press sources. Some journalists moonlighted as paid informers, while others were enticed by the FBI’s monopoly on information and the promise of future cooperation and scoops. The FBI collaborated with the management of a number of television and radio stations, for example, in producing anti-Left programming. Television station WCKT in Miami and Boston, radio station WMEX, and television station WBZ had especially friendly relationships with the FBI. Seattle radio station KIXI reporter Clarence McDaniels was twice sent to Wounded Knee by KIXI management to gather information on the insurgency which then, without his knowledge, was passed directly to the FBI (Donner 1980, 240). Evidence also indicates that the FBI used journalists to infiltrate student movements (Rashke 1981, 171). By and large, many reporters were aware of FBI surveillance not only of King but of the movement as a whole (Donner 1980, 256). During the Birmingham campaign in 1963, Ralph Abernathy discovered a wiretap as he gripped the pulpit, incorporating this “electronic doohickey” into his call to action. The speech was covered by a national press corps that failed to mention this discovery in their stories. FBI agents attending political meetings were easily recognizable to both movement members and journalists. That journalists largely remained silent on the FBI’s surveillance tactics (not to mention the Bureau’s notorious reluctance to intervene in beatings and murders of African Americans and Civil Rights workers in the South) stands as a grim testimony to the Bureau’s power. To put it simply, to not appear 100 percent pro-FBI, much less to criticize the Bureau, was to ensure being put on Hoover’s “nocontact list” of media and to guarantee being subjected to FBI investigation and the likelihood of vicious smear campaigns.16 Even under the best of circumstances, journalists are loath to jeopardize their relationships with official sources. When, in the case of the FBI, criticism meant retribution, journalists looked the other way. In 1968, Hoover was to make a decisive contribution to the gathering conservative backlash against the Great Society. Richard M. Nixon and Hoover had been on friendly terms since the 1950s. Although Johnson and Hoover had established a mutually agreeable relationship, Nixon and Hoover were closer, in both political and ideological terms, as well as in their paranoid, authoritarian personalities. Although Hoover never voted and considered himself to be Reconsidering the Moral Panic 271 apolitical and nonpartisan, the Republican platform’s emphasis on fighting crime boded well for the future of the FBI and was obviously a more attractive alternative than the Democratic Party, which was both too liberal and too confused. In short, the FBI stood to benefit from the War on Crime: it did not benefit from a War on Poverty that sought to prevent crime through education, health, and welfare. The FBI’s ability to secure funding has long depended on its ability to prove that crimes of various kinds were on the rise. Thus, from their inception in 1932, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports have been used, as Hoover put it, “to determine whether there is or is not a crime wave and whether crime is on the increase or decrease” (Ungar 1976, 387). As Ungar (1976) observes, “From 1932 on crime was invariably on the increase,” a very fortuitous situation for an agency that depended on appropriations for fighting crime (p. 387). In 1974, the U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the Federal Census Bureau conducted a study that suggested that most categories of serious crime went unreported, that some police forces kept “their crime incidence rate down in order to claim a higher solution rate” (pp. 388-99), and that dramatic increases and decreases could be fudged in many different ways. The Uniform Crime Reports are, in effect, the perfect measuring device for an agency that needs to be able to prove that crime is on the rise when it is politically expedient, as well as to establish dramatic decreases at other times.17 Generally, crime reports are compiled on a quarterly basis and released without much fanfare. Rarely did the director himself deign to call a press conference for the release of these statistics. But beginning in September 1968, J. Edgar Hoover himself began to make monthly official pronouncements about dramatic increases in crime rates throughout the country, his presence ensuring intensified media coverage. These appearances were to continue throughout the fall, ceasing after Election Day. Thus, on 19 September 1968, Walter Cronkite reported, “FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said today that the national crime rate for the first half of this year increased by 21 percent. The northeastern section of the country and the larger cities recorded the biggest increases” (CBS Evening News, 19 September 1968). One month later, that paragon of political virtue, Spiro Agnew, told reporters, A report recently released by that great American J. Edgar Hoover, and I’m proud to call that man a great American, indicates that serious crimes have increased 57% in seven years. That two-thirds of all the crimes of violence are committed by young people under twenty-one years of age. It tells me that the permissiveness that pervades our society, that’s encouraged by those who rationalize and excuse lawlessness of any form, who allow any form of dissent as long as the so-called objective is meritorious, are tearing down America today. 18 (CBS Evening News, 14 October 1968) 272 Journal of Communication Inquiry Significantly, where the September statistics reported that crime rates had increased 21 percent in the first half of 1968 (an increase that given the political unrest of 1968 and intensified police activity, is not surprising), the October statistics increase the heat, now claiming that serious crimes have increased 57 percent in seven years, seven years that not coincidentally encompassed the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The Democrats, still reeling from the fallout from the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, had no response to Nixon’s argument that “a broadened war on poverty . . . was no substitute for a war on crime” (CBS Evening News, 13 September 1968). Both before and after the 1968 election, news segments on crime rates and calls for law and order were consistently paired with pieces on political dissent. On 4 September 1968, CBS ran the following sequence: a 4-minute, 10second segment on the Nixon/Agnew ticket and calls for law and order, immediately followed by a 3-minute segment on violence at the Democratic Convention, criticizing television for not saying more “about all the injuries heaped on police,” and then a report on an attack on African Americans at a Brooklyn hearing on the Black Panther Party, expressing skepticism about the charge that the group was attacked by 200 off-duty police wearing “Wallace for President” buttons. On 19 September 1968, NBC ran a piece on Eldridge Cleaver and the controversy over his teaching classes at University of California at Berkeley. Immediately following this clip, David Brinkley reported, The FBI reported today that the crime rate in this country has risen again, another 21% in the first half of this year. The biggest increases were in the cities and in the northeast and the type of crime growing most rapidly was robbery, usually in the streets. (NBC Evening News, 19 September 1968) These kinds of framing device—the juxtaposition of dissent with pieces on crime and calls for law and order—became standard fare in the months before the 1968 election, as well as in the years that followed. The criminalization of political protest in general, and the specific demonization of African Americans, however, was not a seamless or contradiction-free process. There are voices raised in opposition that actually make it onto the nightly news during this period. James Farmer, of the Congress of Racial Equality, offered a trenchant critique of Agnew: I think many of the policies and utterances of Governor Agnew may be considered racist. For example, he speaks of law and order without teaming it up with justice and that of itself is racist. He speaks of shooting looters and that would place property values above human life. And that, I think, in the American context, is also racist. So I would agree that many of the policies of Governor Agnew are racist. (CBS Evening News, 13 August 1968) Reconsidering the Moral Panic 273 Joudon Ford of the New York Black Panther Party responded to the storming of the organization’s Oakland, California, headquarters by police on CBS, saying, These men are racist. They are murderers, because they have been murdering and brutalizing black people in their police stations and on the streets for years. Now, the public is finally getting a view of the truth. The pigs are showing their true racist nature. (CBS Evening News, 10 September 1968) As the process of criminalization proceeded, however, and militant organizations disintegrated under the combined pressure of state repression and the internal discord attendant upon this, such voices all but disappear. As I hope this brief narrative has demonstrated, the crime wave that began in the 1960s had its immediate origins not in “larger fears and anxieties about the racial issue in general” (Hall et al. 1978, 21) but as a specific governmental and institutional response to antiracist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist political efforts by people of color. QQ2 The War on Crime and its spawn, the War on Drugs, were actually a frontal attack on people of color (especially blacks and Native Americans), attacks that resulted in the murder or imprisonment of an entire generation of leaders. Conclusions: The Crisis as a Way of Life In conclusion, the moral panic’s ignorance of the industrialization of opinion and the criminalization of dissent underscores its intrinsic ideologism. The resultant fetishization of representation has meant that media analyses frequently do little more than scratch the ideological surface generated by the media. To a large extent, then, the language of crisis and moral panic mimics the logic of the mass media and the news, in this case by directing attention to the synchronic and conflating its own presentism with absolute novelty. The very notion of the crime wave directs attention to sudden and dramatic, as well as unprecedented, increases in crime. Contemporary media, particularly television, have increasingly come to rely on “waves” or “epidemics” to organize a vast flow of information. These “waves” rely on an erasure of history and historical processes that might shed light on the material conditions from which such “waves” emerge and illustrate their actual lack of novelty. In part, these erasures result from the structure and function of capitalist media, media whose primary purpose is to sell audiences to advertisers and whose main currency is mystification. In addition, and this underscores Policing the Crisis’(1978) sometimes startling inattention to the business imperatives of commercial media, a crime wave, moral panic, or moral crusade entails a level of serialization of news sto- 274 Journal of Communication Inquiry ries that can be used to temporarily boost and maintain circulation or audience share.19 Thus, for media dependent on advertising dollars, serialization (particularly in the area of the news, which unlike a decent melodrama cannot guarantee that an enticing scandal will occur each week) represents a significant business strategy. Furthermore, the role of institutions and the state needs to be considered more concretely and with more attention to levels of coordination, cooperation, and strategic planning. There are two ways of considering what might best be described as thematic cycles in crime coverage. In the first, crime waves would more properly be considered as “arrest waves,” since as historian Eric Monkkonen (1981) put it, the statistics on which crime waves are based are a more accurate measure of police activity than criminal behavior (p. 71). While homicide remains categorically stable, other categories of crime are subject to creation, revision, or increased prosecution, all of which have effects on reporting of statistics, those figures of “increase” and “decrease” that allegedly estimate crime rates on the ground. Therefore, FBI or local police statistics based on arrests can give us information about police activity and behavior, but they remain an unreliable index to the level of violence in society. The Tramp Acts adopted and enforced in many cities in the United States in the 1890s, for example, created a new category of crime by criminalizing the movement of unemployed workers. The creation and widespread enforcement of this form of crime (an unemployed male in a city where he was not a resident was subject to arrest) effectively increased arrest statistics of the time. More recently, the War on Drugs contributed to dramatic increases in arrests, which do not necessarily reflect increases in either usage or trafficking. The crackdown on marijuana use and harsher sentencing, for example, have contributed to increased rates of crime. But these increases do not necessarily reflect an increase in marijuana use. Shifting our focus ever so slightly would cause us to redirect attention to elite institutions rather than criminals or media representations or the unstable terrain of public opinion. In addition to redirecting our attention, a critique of Policing the Crisis (1978) needs to understand this text as standing at a crossroads within cultural studies, with one road leading toward more substantive, political-economic analyses and the other toward ideological analyses based on close textual readings.20 Indeed, it might be more appropriate to see Policing the Crisis as the battlefield on which these debates took shape, form, and direction. In either case, there are important lessons to be drawn, thirty years down the line. The first is that cultural studies has yet to make good on its promise of chronicling the everyday, of understanding how and in what directions cultural practices move individuals and groups. We have ceased to listen, if, indeed, we ever learned how. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1999) The Weight of the World in this case offers a most instructive example. Rather than relying on second- and third- Reconsidering the Moral Panic 275 hand accounts of attitudes toward public housing, he and his colleagues undertook a substantive survey of the attitudes of residents. The resultant, multivocal narratives are rich, complex, and moving accounts of their subjects’lived experiences, accounts that avoid both the subjectivism of romanticized accounts of the working class and the objectivism of elitist dismissals of subordinated populations. Although Bourdieu himself would likely object to this, Weight of the World truly embodies the spirit of cultural studies, if not its letter. Finally, despite that the United States now has the largest prison population in the world, not to mention a death machine that continues to murder people in the name of the state, little energy within cultural studies has been devoted to this most serious of topics. Certainly, for an intellectual tradition that has long claimed to be concerned with issues of social justice, this silence is shocking. Confronting a topic such as the prison-industrial complex necessitates attention to political economy as opposed to ideology, to coercion as opposed to consent, to the fundamentally antidemocratic workings of contemporary society. We should all be made uncomfortable by examples of overt and intentional racism on the part of government agencies, and we must recognize and confront the ways in which racism is in fact chosen by elite institutions and individuals and the manner in which it continues to be socially sanctioned. It may be that the belief that public opinion both exists and supports law-and-order measures enables those already distant from the effects of such measures to continue to overlook the state violence enacted in our name. Notes 1. Ruth Frankenberg’s (1993) White Women, Race Matters uses ethnographic research to provide important insights into the racial aspects of fear. In particular, see chapter 3, “Growing Up White: The Social Geography of Race.” 2. For a more quantitative analysis, see Graber (1980). 3. See Ericson, Baranek, and Chan (1987) on routinization, Goffman (1962) on institutions, and Chomsky (1989) on paired examples for illustrations of this. Content analysis of various media can also be used to document this sort of agreement. 4. Although Hall (1981) later challenged the assumption that publicity and popularity are linked in “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” the analysis remains abstract. 5. It is worth noting that the argument about resistance typically has been made in relation to celebrities and entertainment programming and not news or public affairs programming. 6. This is not, of course, a new argument. In Culture and Society, for example, Williams ([1958] 1983) wrote, There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses. In an urban industrial society there are many opportunities for such ways of seeing. The point is not to reiterate the objective conditions but to consider, personally and collectively, what these have done to our thinking. (P. 300) 7. What little debate there was would have been farcical if the effects of the bill had not been so tragic: it is difficult to forget the spectacle of a heated debate about “pork.” 276 Journal of Communication Inquiry 8. Here, we should also bear in mind the ways in which a rhetoric of victims’rights served to effectively shut down debate about crime policies. See Jennifer Wood’s (1999) Codes of Innocence: The Rhetoric of Victimization for a compelling analysis of this point. 9. It may also be true that the media and politicians assume that silence on a given issue equals consent to it rather than passivity and the hopelessness that feeds on lack of access to decision-making processes. 10. See, for example, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens’s (1931) observations about the news industry. In a chapter of his autobiography, titled “I Make a Crime Wave,” Steffens recounts how he and Jacob Riis did just that, only to be chastised by New York City Mayor Theodore Roosevelt when the crime wave threatened his reputation as reformer. 11. See Powers (1983) and Ungar (1976) on Hoover’s upbringing in what was essentially the segregated Southern city of Washington, DC. 12. Hoover’s dislike of Clark resulted from the Attorney General’s openly critical attitude toward the War on Crime and the crime-fighting policies that followed from it. See Clark’s (1970) Crime in America: Observations on Its Nature, Causes, Prevention, and Control. 13. Theoharis and Cox (1988) observe, “When the director learned that Senate Republican minority leader Hugh Scott proposed to introduce a bill to strike a commemorative medal in honor of King,” he had the senator briefed about King’s “background” (p. 360). Later, Hoover briefed the House Appropriations Committee about the information contained in the FBI’s King dossier in an effort “to defeat a proposed congressional resolution to make a national holiday of King’s Birthday” (pp. 410-11). 14. The FBI’s folder on Martin Luther King was some 500 to 600 pages long, although an unspecified number of pages were withheld under court order of 31 January 1977 (Theoharis and Cox 1988, 358). 15. This example also underscores the director’s misogyny: Hoover mistakenly assumed that a group of women would not object to such a statement, much less report it. 16. John Seigenthaler, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean and the Justice Department representative on the Freedom Rides through the South, filed a complaint in 1976 with the Justice Department for “improper conduct on the part of agents of the Bureau” (Rashke 1981, 177). The FBI later began a rumor that Seigenthaler was “involved in having illicit relations with young females” (Rashke 1981, p. 181). The Justice Department later issued an apology and purged his files. 17. The study also raised questions about a sudden, nationwide drop in crime reported by the Bureau before the 1972 election. As Ungar (1976) points out, “The suspicion was that someplace along the line—perhaps in some local police departments—the figures had been tampered with to help the law-and-order reputation of the Nixon administration” (p. 389). 18. In an interesting twist, this clip ran immediately after Agnew had publicly apologized for his references to “Pollacks and fat Japs.” 19. It seems to me that the moral crusade has become a rather archaic term. That is, contemporary crime coverage has none of the reformer’s zeal of earlier eras. Having given up any belief in reform when it comes to crime and criminals, the focus is strictly on increased repression. 20. That the former represents the path not taken is the topic for a proper history of cultural studies. John Clarke’s (1991) New Times and Old Enemies offers some excellent insights into this shift. References Barnouw, Erik. 1968. The golden web: A history of broadcasting in the United States, volume 2—1933 to 1953. New York: Oxford University Press. Reconsidering the Moral Panic 277 Branch, Taylor. 1988. Parting the waters: America in the King years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon & Schuster. ———. 1998. Pillar of fire: America in the King years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Public opinion does not exist. In Sociology in question, translated by Richard Nice, 132-38. 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She is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix (1994); the author of “Nike, ‘Social’ Responsibility, and the Hidden Abode of Production” in Critical Studies in Mass Communication (2000); and the editor of Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a book on the history of media coverage of crime in the United States.