Journalism, Moral Panic and the Public Interest

The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic?

National and international health organizations have focused increasingly on a perceived obesity epidemic said to pose drastic threats to public health. Indeed, some medical experts have gone so far as to predict that growing body mass will halt and perhaps even reverse the millennia-long trend of rising human life expectancy. 1 In response to such concerns public health agencies across the wor...

Moral Panic and Sexual Offenses against Children

It had all the appearances of a conventional sentencing hearing. The accused sat quietly in the front row of the Middleton Court House with his wife beside him, arm in arm. She gave him one last hug after the judge pronounced sentence: five years in a federal institution. Among the small group attending the hearing were two young teenagers, the daughters of the accused. When the judge handed do...

Conceptualizing Moral Panic through a Moral Economy of Harm

This paper explicates a critical theory of moral panic, arguing that there is an afŽ nity to be discerned between the sociology of moral panic and the sociology of moral regulation. It is demonstrated how efforts to distance sociological investigations of moral regulation from studies of moral panic have been founded on a narrow treatment of the ways in which the latter have conceptualized pani...

Regulation and the Public Interest

The increase in government regulation during the 1960s and 1970s is examined, as well as showing the importance of understanding the benefit/cost ratio of regulation.

Hospitals and the public interest.