The Development Of Moral Panics Under The New-media Environment

Since the "little Yueyue" event attracted wide attention from public in china, people started to seriously concerned about the moral situation of Chinese society. A wide range of moral panic were emerged. This article tried to analyze the role of mass media during the moral panic. The research took the news reports of the "little Yueyue" event from people.com.cn as samples, in order to explore how the media influenced the process of the moral panic. The research results showed that while reporting an event, media can affect the construction of the reality consciously or unconsiously by using certain language strategies, thus it affected the public’s acknowledge of the event. By doing this, the media launched a moral panic. After the moral panic emerged, the media diffused it by making comments, quoting authority’s views, reporting the public reaction and predicting the happening of similar events. During the late stage of a moral panic, the media returned to rational gradually, it started to publish more positive reports, thus controlled the spreading of the panic. After a period of time, the media started to lose its interests and certain control measures were obtained by the government, the moral panic gradually subsided. This article also considered the impact of new media environment. The research results suggested that in order to prevent or reduce the happening of moral panics, the public and the mass media should both be rational. The public should distinguish false information with the truth and treat the new media with caution. And the mass media should provide a fair and open information platform and maintain objective while reporting the news.