Sociology in the News

News Values

News values are criteria journalists used to decide whether an event is newsworthy.

News Values are general criteria such as ‘extraordinariness’, ‘negativity’ and ‘elite persons’ which journalists use to determine whether an event is newsworthy (‘worthy of inclusion in the news’).

The existence of news values is one of the reasons why many sociologists view the news as a social construction – in other words the news is not simply an unbiased reflection of the objectively most important events ‘out there’ in society; rather the news is the end result of selective processes through which gatekeepers such as owners, editors and journalists make choices about what events are important enough to be covered, and how they should be covered.

Spencer-Thomas (2008) defines News values as general guidelines or criteria that determine the worth of a news story and how much prominence it is given by newspapers or broadcast media. Brighton and Foy (2007) suggest that news values are ‘often intangible, informal, almost unconscious elements’. News values define what journalists, editors and broadcasters consider as newsworthy.

The best known list of news values was supplied by Galtung and Rouge (1970). They analysed international news across a group of newspapers in Norway in 1965 and identified a number of News Values shared by Norwegian journalists (1)

News Values

Galtung and Rouge (1970) identified several news values inlcuding:

Negativity
Threshold
Extraordinariness
Unambiguity
Personalisation
Reference to elite persons
Reference to elite nations.

Extraordinariness

Rare, unpredictable and surprising events have more newsworthiness than routine events.

The September 11th 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers remain probably the best example of an event that was extraordinary!

News Values September 11th — September 11 – no one saw it coming!

Threshold

The more people that are affected by an event and the more dramatically their lives are impacted, then more likely an event is to be reported.

Examples of events which fit the threshold criteria include the London Riots, the War in Ukraine, the Cost of Living Crisis and large natural disasters.

News values London Riots — The London Riots.

Unambiguity

The simpler the event, the more likely it is to be reported.

Natural disasters are good examples of events which are unambiguous. There is no complex politics which needs explaining, at least not in terms of the disaster itself.

Reference to elite persons

Events surrounding the famous and the powerful are often seen as more newsworthy. Probably the best example of this from 2022 was the death of Queen Elizabeth when there was a week of rolling news coverage about nothing really that interesting.

Had the Queen been any other old lady, her death would not have been newsworthy.

Reference to elite nations

Events in nations perceived to be ‘culturally similar’ to the United Kingdom are more likely to reported on – for example, disasters in America are more likely to be reported on than disasters in African countries.

Personalisation

if events can be personalised easily they are more likely to get into the news.

You will see this in the reporting of responses to natural disasters, with several reports focusing in on individual families and there is always a ‘toddler pulled from the wreckage’ story!

Negativity

bad news is regarded as more newsworthy than good news.

grenfell tower fire news values — Negative events are more likely to make the news

According to Galtung and Rouge, journalists use News-Values to select-out certain events as less newsworthy than others, and they thus act as gate-keepers – they quite literally shut out certain events, and let other events into the news-agenda, thus narrowing our window on the world.

There are some contemporary critiques of the concept of News Values, but I’ll come back to those later!

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to students opting for the media module as part of second year sociology.

Sources

(1) Chapman 2106, Sociology for AQA A-Level, Collins.

Grenfell Tower – Profits before Safety?

This truly horrific, and avoidable tragedy seems to be a perfect illustration of the downsides of neoliberal policies – deregulation, cutting public services (such as social housing) and outsourcing to private companies are the three cornerstones of neoliberal economic policy – and the conflation of these three things together seem to be directly responsible for the deaths in Grenfell Tower.

Grenfell Tower neoliberalism — The official death toll for the Grenfell Tower is currently 79 people, although the actual number might be considerably higher.

NB – This isn’t just me saying this, below is an approximate quote by Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, in a speech given on 24th June:

‘The Grenfell Tower fire was a ‘direct consequence of Tory attitudes towards social housing… they think they are second class citizens, and thus they got second class fire safety standards. It is also a direct consequence of outsourcing and of deregulation” (video from The Independent).

Five things which suggest Kensington Council put profits before safety…

I’ve taken the five pieces of evidence from a recent article in The Week : ‘The Grenfell Inferno: were profits put before safety’? (NB – as far as I can tell, this is only in the print copy of The Week, 24th June, Issue 1130).

One – The council ignored repeated warnings by Grenfell residents

Grenfell residents had repeatedly warned KCTMO that the building was unsafe:

rubbish blocking hallways was going uncollected
emergency lighting was inadequate
there was no fire escape (save the main stairs)
fire extinguishers weren’t being tested
repeated power surges had led to electrical appliances catching fire previously.
It was also claimed that on the night of the fire, the fire alarms failed.

The council’s response was to actually threaten one of those bringing up the issue of fire safety with legal action:

Two – The council made a conscious choice to cut costs on social housing

The council had the money to make the Tower safe, but it chose not to spend it.

In 2016 it spent only £40 million on social housing, despite making £55 million in rent
In 2013, having saved £30 million in an ‘efficiency drive’, it rewarded its top-rate council tax payers with £100 rebate.
Kensington and Chelsea council also have £274 million in reserves.

Amelia Gentlemen in The Guardian suggests that, in the context of the vast wealth in the borough, there is a strong suspicion that council officials ‘see social housing tenants, many of them immigrants, as a nuisance, occupying valuable land that could be sold off to developers at a vast profit’.

Three – The council outsourced the recent refurbishment of Grenfell Tower to a firm called Rydon, which has a track record of putting profits before safety.

Rydon, which made a pre-tax profit of £14 million last year, won the contract over the councils ‘preferred contractor’ by undercutting them, despite the fact that another council, Sutton council, had recently cancelled a five year repairs contract with Rydon becaue its performance fell short of requirements.

Rydon subcontracted out the Grenfell work to nine different companies, which raised ‘serious concerns about the quality of supervision and accountability’.

So it was Rydon that was the firm who would have agreed to install the non fire-proof cladding, rather than going for the fire-proof panels for an extra £5000.

Four – Deregulation has meant that landlords have managed to avoid acting on fire safety advice.

Retrofitting sprinklers (which would have cost £200 000) was one of the recommendations made after a fire at Lakanal House in south London in 2009 killed nine people, but lawmakers decided not to make this mandatory – they left it up to landlords and councils to do so on a voluntary basis, and few did.

deregulation Grenfell — The Cabinet Office boasts how deregulation has reduced the rigor of fire safety inspections

Five – The incapable response by the council to the disaster

Despite an amazing voluntary response by the public, the ‘council was no where to be seen’ – even 24 hours after the fire, there was no centralised co-ordination from the council, no point of information about missing persons, and some residents were still sleeping rough 4 days later.

All of this suggests that the council see social housing tenants as second class citizens.

NB – the poor treatment is continuing several days later….According to The Guardian around 30 households were subsequently told by the council that they would have to move out their Holiday Inn accommodation because of previous bookings; some families have been asked to move several times.

The relevance of all of this to A-level sociology….

As I mentioned above, this tragedy can be used to illustrate downsides of neoliberal policies – deregulation, cutting public services (such as social housing) and outsourcing to private companies are the three cornerstones of neoliberal economic policy – and the conflation of these three things together seem to be directly responsible for the deaths in Grenfell Tower.

It’s also a useful reminder that poor people in rich (unequal) societies can be treated appallingly, suggesting that inequality is the main barrier to further social development in so called ‘developed’ countries like the United Kingdom.

I also think Bauman’s concept of ‘flawed consumers’ can be applied here – Bauman has long commented that capitalism produces ‘surplus people’ – those without the means to consume, and many of the Grenfell residents fit this category – and because they perform no useful function in a capitalist system (because they can’t buy that many things and keep profit flowing) these people are treated with contempt, as this case study clearly demonstrates.

As a final note, a harsh question I’d like people to consider is simply this – how many people in the U.K. genuinely believe that the state should guarantee a decent standard of housing for everyone, even if that means spending a few billion extra pounds at the national level, which in turn would mean an increasing in taxes?

Clearly the Kensington council leader, and probably most of the Tory party, think the state should provide no or minimal help to the poor in the form of social housing, that’s one of the main strands of neoliberal thought, but how many of those people cheering for Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury really believe the state should pay more towards social housing, especially if that means your council tax bill going up?

I have this uncomfortable feeling that while it’s easy to come together and hate the Tories, if you probed public opinion a little deeper, there probably wouldn’t be that much support for increased spending on social welfare, or that much commitment to giving serious thought about how to implement policies to make capitalism work better for the poor, let alone how to replace it with a post-capitalist order.

Why Did Labour Gain Seats in the 2017 General Election?

In the recent June 2017 General Election, Labour won more votes than it did in 2001, 2005, 2010 or 2015, proving almost all the forecasts and commentators wrong.According to this Guardian article there are three main reasons for this…

It motivated young people to get out and vote.

A lot’s been made of the historically high turnout by 18-24 year olds…. It looks like in key constituencies – from Harrow West to Canterbury (a seat that has been Conservative since 1918) – the youth vote was vital. Labour showed it cared about young people by promising to scrap tuition fees, an essential move to stop the marketisation of higher education, and it proposed a house-building programme that would mean many more could get on the property ladder.

This is in stark contrast to the two other major parties – the Lib Dems in 2010 under Nick Clegg lied to them, and the Conservatives have attacked them – cutting housing benefits for 18- to 21-year-olds, excluding under-25s from the minimum wage rise and slashing the education maintenance allowance. At this election, Theresa May offered nothing to young people in her manifesto. Their message was: put up with your lot. Under the Tories, young people have been taken for granted and sneered at as too lazy to vote.

The NUS reported a 72% turnout by young people, and there is a definite thread in the media attributing the swing towards Labour as down to this.

However, this is contested by Jack Sommors in this article who suggests that it was middle-aged people who swung the election result away from the Tories.

‘Lord Ashcroft’s final poll, which interviewed 14,000 people from Wednesday to Friday last week, found people aged 35 to 44 swung to Labour – 50% voted for them while just 30% voted for the Tories. This is compared to 36% of them voting Labour and 26% backing the Tories just two years ago’.

A further two reasons which might explain the swing, let’s say among the younger half of the voting population, rather than just the very youngest are:

Labour offered localised politics, not a marketing approach

Labour rejected the marketing approach to politics in favour of a strong, localised grassroots campaign… this was not simply an election May lost; it was one in which Corbyn’s Labour triumphed. Labour proposed collectivism over individualism and a politics that people could be part of.

Labour offered a genuine alternative to neoliberalism…

Labour offered a positive agenda to an electorate that’s been told its only choice is to swallow the bitter pill of neoliberalism – offering a decisive alternative to Tory austerity in the shape of a manifesto packed with policies directly challenging what has become the economic status quo in the UK. Labour no longer accepted the Tory agenda of cuts (a form of economics long ago abandoned in the US and across Europe): it offered investment in public services, pledged not to raise taxes for 95% of the population, talked about a shift to a more peaceful foreign policy, promised to take our rail, water and energy industries out of shareholders’ hands and rebalance power in the UK.

So how is this relevant to A-level Sociology…?

In terms of values…It seems to show a widespread rejection of neoliberal ideas among the youth, and possibly evidence that neoliberal policies really have damaged most people’s young people’s (and working class people’s) life chances, and this result is a rejection of this.
In terms of the media… It’s a reminder that the mainstream media doesn’t reflect public opinion accurately- just a thin sliver of the right wing elite. It also suggests that the mainstream media is losing its power to shape public opinion and behavior, given the negative portrayals of Corbyn in the mainstream. .

Value-Freedom and explaining election results…

The above article is written with a clearly left-leaning bias. Students may like to reflect on whether it’s actually possible to explain the dramatic voter swing towards Labour objectively, and how you might go about getting valid and representative data on why people voted like they did, given that there are so many possible variables feeding into the outcome of this election?!

Sources

Young people voted because labour didn’t sneer at them. It’s that simple

General Election 2017: Young turn out ‘remarkable’

Sociology in the News: Parental Choice Versus State Control

The supreme court this week upheld the ban on parents taking their children out of school for family holidays during term time.

The decision upheld a fine imposed on Jon Platt by the Ilse of White Council for taking his daughter out of school for an unauthorised seven-day break in April 2015.

Regulations introduced in 2013 curtailed the ability of headteachers at state schools in England to grant up to two weeks’ term-time holiday for pupils with good attendance, but they can still grant authorised absences.

The standard penalty for an unauthorised absence is £60.

Arguments for restricting parents’ freedom to take their children out of school

Firstly it’s unfair on parents who stick to the rules…

Delivering the judgment, Lady Hale, said: “Unauthorised absences have a disruptive effect, not only on the education of the individual child but also on the work of other pupils…. if one pupil can be taken out whenever it suits the parent, then so can others … Any educational system expects people to keep the rules. Not to do so is unfair to those obedient parents who do keep the rules, whatever the costs or inconvenience to themselves.”

Secondly, it’s unfair on teachers who are under pressure to deliver results…

Ultimately teachers will have to carry of the burden of ‘catching up’ the students who have missed lessons.

Arguments against restricting parents’ freedom to take their kids out of school

Firstly – it takes power away from parents…

Jon Plat argues that it’s wrong for the state to take the power to make decisions affecting child welfare away from parents.

Secondly, it’s unfair on the poorest sections of society…

For those on a low income, the fact that they won’t be able to save £300 (or thereabouts) by going away in the second compared to the third week of July, will make the difference between going on holiday or not.

There’s also the fact that this will be ineffective against thick-skinned, economically rational parents – basically the £60 fine is considerably less than the money a family will save going on holiday a week early in summer, before the proper summer holidays start.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

This case also demonstrates the tension between ‘strong state control’ and individual freedom in New Right thinking on education – it’s something of a contradiction allowing parental choice of schools and then disallowing them this choice.

Marxists might point to the fact that this is really a case of disallowing the poor a choice – the rich who go to private schools or home educate their kids, or who simply have the cultural capital balls to not pay the paltry £60 fine and not worry about it, they can still go on holiday on the 14^th of July.

‘Actuarial risk management’ has probably also got something to do with the government’s support for this – no doubt the aggregate (average) statistics tell us there is a correlation between attendance and achievement and so this here is just being applied to everyone, without discrimination.

This case study is also relevant to the sociology of the family.

This seems to be a clear-cut (and very unfortunate) example of overt discrimination on the basis of religion:

juhel-miah-discrimination — Juel Miah – A victim of U.S. discrimination

On 16th February, Juhel Miah, a respected British Muslim schoolteacher travelling as part of a school trip to New York was denied entry to the United States.

He was travelling from Wales with a group of children and other teachers and was removed from the plane while on a stop-over in Reykjavik, Iceland, despite having all the necessary documentation including a valid Visa for entry into the U.S.

The articles don’t state as much, but I’m assuming that all other non-Muslim adults on the plane weren’t escorted off.

Juhel has asked the American Embassy for an explanation of why he was refused entry to the U.S, but one week on and they haven’t responded.

This seems to be an unambiguous (but bleak), real-life example to illustrate what discrimination is – in this case differential treatment on the basis of someone’s religion. It could also be used to illustrate the extent to which Islamophobia is driving U.S. immigration policy.

Source – The Guardian, Monday 20th February.

You might also like The Independent’s version

Ethnic inequalities in social mobility

Black and Asian Muslim children are less likely to get professional jobs, despite doing better at school, according to an official government report carried out by the Social Mobility Commission.

This blog post summarizes this recent news article (December 2016) which can be used to highlight the extent of ethnic inequalities in social mobility – it obviously relates to education and ethnicity, but also research methods – showing a nice application of quantitative, positivist comparative methods.

In recent months, the low educational attainment of White British boys has gained significant attention. However, when it comes to the transition from education to employment, this group is less likely to be unemployed and to face social immobility than their female counterparts, black students and young Asian Muslims.”

White boys from poorer backgrounds perform badly throughout the education system and are the worst performers at primary and secondary school, the report said, and disadvantaged young people from white British backgrounds are the least likely to go to University.

Only one in 10 of the poorest go to university, compared to three in 10 for black Caribbean children, five in 10 for Bangladeshis and nearly seven in 10 for Chinese students on the lowest incomes.

Black children, despite starting school with the same level of maths and literacy as other ethnic groups, young black people also have the lowest outcomes in science, maths are the least likely ethnic group to achieve a good degree at university.

But after school, it is young women from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds that are particularly affected. Despite succeeding throughout education and going to university, they are less likely to find top jobs and are paid less than women from other ethnic minorities, the report concluded.

Alan Milburn, the chair of the commission said: “The British social mobility promise is that hard work will be rewarded. This research suggests that promise is being broken for too many people in our society. Britain is a long way from having a level playing field of opportunity for all, regardless of gender, ethnicity or background.”

The report also showed the role of parents plays a large part in performance at school, as the more they engage, the better their children do, according to the research

Two of the more specific recommendations made by the commission are

Schools should avoid setting, particularly at primary level, and government should discourage schools from doing so.
Universities should implement widening participation initiatives that are tailored to the issues faced by poor white British students and address worrying drop-out and low achievement rates among black students

Related Posts

Ethnic minorities face barriers to job opportunities and social mobility (Guardian article from 2014) – so nothing’s changes in the last two years!

Ethnicity and Educational Achievement – The role of Cultural Factors – you might like to consider the extent to which it’s cultural factors which explain these post-education differences?

The C.V. and Racism Experiment (scroll down to 2009) – alternatively – racism in society may have something to do with these differences – this experiment demonstrated how people with ‘ethnic’ sounding names are less likely to get a response from prospective employers when they send them their C.V.s

Company Bosses really don’t deserve their high incomes

The link between what bosses are paid and a company’s financial performance is “negligible”, according to new research summarized by this BBC news item (December 2016)

The median pay for chief executives at Britain’s 350 biggest companies was £1.9m in 2014 – a rise of 82% in 11 years – the study by Lancaster University Management School found.

However, performance as measured by return on capital invested was less than 1% during that period.

The study, commissioned by the investment association CFA UK suggested that the metrics typically used to gauge company performance, such as total shareholder return and earnings per share growth were too short termist. Will Goodhart, head of CFA UK, said: “Too few of today’s popular approaches … genuinely align senior executives’ pay with the economic value that they create.”

Social Policy Responses .

Among the measures under consideration are requiring companies to publish pay ratios, which would show the gap in earnings between the chief executive and an average employee.

Shareholders could also be handed more powers to vote against bosses’ pay – although an earlier proposal to force companies to put workers on boards has been dropped by the government.

Commentary

This 82% increase in CEO PAY (the top 0.01%) stands in contrast to an average 10% decline in real income since 2008 for the rest of us and so this is further evidence of increasing inequality in the U.K. So if the findings of the Spirit Level are true, this has done enormous harm to Britain over the past decade.

It is also evidence against the view that we live in a meritocratic society (against the basic Functionalist and New Right views of education)- if you can get yourself into that super-elite, it seems that you have the power to set your own bonus, irrespective of what you actually contribute.

This appears to be yet more evidence of the continued relevance of Marxist theory!

Causes and Consequences of The Civil War in Syria

Below are a few resources focusing on the causes and consequences of the ongoing (hopefully soon to be recent) civil war in Syria. (‘War and Conflict’ in relation to development is part of the A Level Sociology Global Development topic).

The causes of the civil war in Syria

This Guardian video does a reasonable job of explaining some of the causes of the Syrian Civil War in five minutes. NB it has its critics – see below!

The trigger event which caused the Civil War in Syria was when 1000s of people took the street in January 2011 to demand political reforms (e.g. elections) inspired by ‘The Arab Spring ‘ – a wave of violent and non-violent protests which had swept across many North African and Middle Eastern Countries in December – January 2012.

The protesters were protesting about the brutal rule of dictator president Assad who had ruled Syria in the interests of a relatively small elite since the year 2000, when he took over from his father, who had ruled the country since the 1970s, having modernised it while brutally repressing any dissent.

Assad’s response to the protests was to violently repress the initially non-violent protests by shooting over a hundred demonstrators. Over the coming months some of these armed themselves and formed small groups of rebels – the ensuing conflict between Assad’s security forces and the rebels resulted in 60 000 deaths in the first 18 months of the conflict.

The root of the conflict can be further traced back to the after math of World War I when France and Britain established the boarders of the Middle Eastern Countries, lumping many different ethnic groups and religions into Syria. The ethnic/ religious breakdown of Syria’s population is approximately 12% Alawites (President Assad’s ethnic group),8% Christians, 3% Shiites, and 74% Sunnis.

NB – The video has an equal amount of likes and dislikes – with many of the commentators pointing to the fact that the video misses out the role of the USA in causing conflict all across the middle east – commentators argue that the US has a long history of arming rebel groups in the Middle East as part of its foreign policy to deliberately destabilise the region.

Who is Fighting Who and Why?

This second video by VOX starts off by pointing out that the war in Syria is a mess, with four main groups involved:

The Assad/ government forces, backed by Russia and Iran,
The Rebels, backed by the Saudis, Turkey and the USA,
The Kurds, also backed by the USA
ISIS, which established a ‘Caliphate’ in an area which spread across the Syria-Iraq border.

This video focuses more on how the conflict has develop and points to the important fact that Syria has now become a ‘Proxy War’ in which other nation states are effectively fighting each other by funding different factions within the conflict, but without being directly involved themselves.

By 2013 money and troops were being funneled to the rebels by Sunni Muslims (e.g. the Saudis) While Iran (Shia Muslims) funneled money and troops to Assad.

In late 2013, the USA stepped into the war when Obama signed a secret deal for the CIA to train and equip the rebels.

In February 2014 ISIS emerges – which focuses on fighting the rebels and the Kurds, not Assad, and the US now has an ongoing dilemma which confuses matters and possibly prevents the US from taking effective action – who is it’s real enemy – ISIS or Assad?

Up until this time, Assad was losing ground to both the rebels and ISIS until September 2015 when Russia stepped in by bombing US backed rebels, and to date (December 2016) it seems like Assad is likely to defeat the rebel forces.

NB – As with the previous video, this also has its critics, so as with all sources, be skeptical of the validity!

Causes of the Civil War in Syria – A Summary

To my mind, for the purposes of A level Sociology you can simplify the causes of this conflict thus:

Nasty bad men (dictators) in the middle east don’t allow people to vote and oppress anyone who opposes them.
People in many middle eastern countries want the right to vote and basically governments who don’t abuse their human rights.
They use social media to organise and publicise protests – which spread all over the middle east and quickly to Syria
The nasty dictator, Assad, wants to cling onto power so he kills hundreds of the protesters
Other nations have a role to play in perpetuating the crisis – Russia and Iran by funding Assad and the USA by funding the rebels.
NB – Don’t fall into the trap of seeing the USA as backing the ‘good guys’ and supporting democracy versus the bad Russians and crazy Muslims who want to keep the evil dictator Assad in place because that’s in their economic/ ideological interests – the USA has a history of backing ‘evil dictators’ itself, when they support US interests at least.
You could further trace all of these problems back to the ethnic and religious divide/ tensions in Syria, which in turn was at least partially created by the French and British when they invented the country by drawing up artificial boarders after World War I.

The Consequences of the Civil War in Syria

Sociology in the News – Focus on Education

A couple of interesting items in the news this week about the pros and cons of strict systems of education.

This article from the Daily Mail outlines the strict social-control policies at the The Michaela Community School (a free school) in a deprived area of north west London where pupils, on average, are doing twice as well as those in other comprehensives.

Policies include such things as children not being allowed to talk in lessons, having to walk single file in lessons and being required to do 90 minutes of homework a night.

The school models itself on the strict Tiger Parenting style adopted by Amy Chua, with teachers having extremely high expectations and having a zero tolerance approach to dissent. Parents also have to sign a detailed contract agreeing to support the school ethos.

Interestingly, selection is by lottery, and the school is oversubscribed, although liberal middle class parents are less likely to agree with the educational style.

This seems to show how a strict school ethos can really make a difference for kids from deprived backgrounds, and it also shows the advantages of Free Schools – if done well – as the methods used go against current teaching practices – but more than half of the teachers at this school aren’t qualified, as Free Schools are allowed to hire UQTs.
A second article from The Guardian outlines the centrality of educational achievement and success in South Korea>

South Korea fell silent on Thursday as more than 600,000 students sat the annual college entrance exam, which could define their future in the ultra-competitive country. Success in the exam – which teenage South Koreans spend years preparing for – means a place in one of the elite colleges seen as key to a future career and even marriage prospects.

The government put in place some extraordinary measures to ensure students could focus on the examination:

Government offices, major businesses and even Seoul’s stock market opened at 10am, an hour later than usual, so as to clear the roads so that students could get to the exams on time.
Transport authorities halted all airport landings and take-offs for 30 minutes in the afternoon to coincide with the main language listening test.
Work at many construction sites was suspended and large trucks were banned from the roads near test venues

The pressure to score well in the exam has been blamed for teenage depression and suicide rates that are among the highest in the world.

To bring the two items together – maybe what makes the strictness the Michaela Community School so appealing is that it can enable students to get ahead of their peers in a more liberal education system, but if every school and family adopted this tiger-education approach, we’d just end up with more miserable and suicidal kids in the long run as everyone just spends more and more time trying to get ahead of each other.

Sociology in the News (8) – Killer Clowns and Donald Trump’s Misogyny

The Killer Clown Craze

The societal response to the so called ‘Killer Clown Craze‘ seems like a good example of a moral panic. Piers Morgan (moral entrepreneur supremo) has waded in against the craze, and as soon as he gets involved in anything, that’s a sure sign of moral panic). Twenty years ago, people dressed in scary clown costumes would have been regarded as ‘Halloween pranksters’, today they’re regarded as public menaces who are a threat to public order and child well-being.

Thames Valley Police reported that –

‘In the last 24 hours we have been called to 14 incidents across the region where people have reported being intimidated or frightened by others dressed as clowns. This follows the report of other incidents across the country which have been widely reported in the national media. While we don’t want to be accused of stopping people enjoying themselves we would also ask those same people to think of the impact of their behaviour on others and themselves.’

The public have been warned that dressing up as a clown with the intent to scare people could result in a criminal record, and children have been advised to phone child line if they are distressed by such sightings. Staffordshire police have further advised that people don’t ‘like’ Killer Clown pages on Facebook.

Maybe the chainsaw wielding clowns are taking this a step-too far, but as far as I can see, most of the incidents are harmless pranks, meaning the panic over this is almost certainly disproportionate, possibly a response to living in a culture of fear in which paranoid parents construct children as delicate objects in need of protection. Surely 30 years ago clown pranks would have been laughed off as funny?

This is also a great example of a ‘hyperreal’ deviant phenomenon – some people are even dressing up as superheros and chasing the Killer Clowns…

Donald Trump’s Downfall

Donald Trump’s downfall is a useful example of how Synoptic Surveillance can bring down the powerful – It looks like his chances of winning the US election are now extremely slim after video footage came to light of him engaged in what he thought was a private conversation in which he described his failure to ‘fuck’ (his words) a married T.V. presenter even thought he’d ‘moved on her like a bitch’, shortly after he himself had just married. He also boasted of groping women in the same conversation.

Synoptic Surveillance is a concept developed by Thomas Mathiesson to describe how surveillance is now carried out by a diverse range of people, rather than just the state keeping citizens under surveillance – as a result power is now more widely dispersed and those with political power are subject to more control from below, through journalistic surveillance for example.

Maybe the next moral panic will consist of people dressing up in Donald Trump masks groping women? (‘Honest love, it was just a joke’.)

Category: Sociology in the News

Why Did Labour Gain Seats in the 2017 General Election?

It motivated young people to get out and vote.

A further two reasons which might explain the swing, let’s say among the younger half of the voting population, rather than just the very youngest are:

Labour offered localised politics, not a marketing approach

Labour offered a genuine alternative to neoliberalism…