Study On Media Production Process Of Moral Panic Under The New-media Environment

The essence of moral panic is the interactivity of different social roles under the auspices of the media. In the new communication environment, media have shown profounder effects on all levels of the society. Therefore, people's way of thinking,self-awareness have been vividly stigmatized by the media, the mediumlization of human beings and society leads to a distinctly mediated mode of the moral panic,including the forming path and the diffusion process.It has triggered a widespread concern among the public about teachers' ethics in universities and colleges in China since the immoral acts of Professor Wu Chunming who took use of his title as a PhD Supervisor in Xiamen University to have a series of sex attacks on his female students have been exposed. And these scandals have been a catalyst for the public's extreme opinion on the faculty and the education system under the help of dissemination of the media. The moral panic which was leaded by the Wu Chunming incident was the integrated use of many reporting ways, including exaggeration and distortion,agenda setting, media label theory, media trial, media frame theory, media mobilization, and so on. New media play important roles in the process. Firstly, new media lead to the openness of the risk,which sharply increases the perceptive risk of the society. And also, because of lacking of professionalism,new media increase the uncertainty of the risk,thus contributing to the formation of panic.In addition, the instantaneity, universality, and de-centralization of the new media facilitates to a wider and deeper moral panic, which is also the main reason of the widely spread of the panic.The essay will try to find the essence of concept of moral panic by previous literature review,and at the same time, by analyzing the text of Wu Chunming incident reported by both in the new and traditional media,try to give a map of the path in which the moral formed and spread, and the way that the media produced it. In that way, the essay want to make a conclusion of the relationship of moral panic and mediaproduction, which helps to explore the new interaction between the audience and social organizations under the mediated society, and finally guide to avoid and stop the formation and spread of moral panic.