Student Riot as a moral panic

How are the students and women represented within the article?

Article link here >>> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332811/TUITION-FEES-PROTEST-Students-streets-girls-leading-charge.html

The students who have been reported to be mainly female that created the student riot over tuition fees have been represented in the The Daily Mail in an extremely negative way even the title/headline of the article shows this. “Rage of the girl rioters: Britain’s students take to the streets again and this time women are leading the charge” this is used in order to hook consumers to read the story as they use the terms such as rage and girls which stereotypical is a male dominated reference to being aggressive. It also states with the quote "this time" that it has happened before and thus will keep happening so in other words the media are trying to create a moral panic which is a theory by Stanley Cohen that i produced a post on earlier stating how the media fashions these episodes by stylising them and amplifying the effects making them into a national problem when they could of been keep under control quite easily. However the media may be using this moral panic as they call it to cover up the reason why the students are rioting as that point isn't well explained within the article. The media even go as far as to represent the riot as a war by using the word charge with in most peoples mind will remind them of a group of soldiers charging into battle thus suggesting that the students are causing mass destruction.

Another example of what Stanley Cohen theory moral panics explains would be "Dancing in the streets" this puts in my mind almost a gang cultural or that of a cult when people dance around camp fires which is labelled as a type of negative behaviour and is even represented in horror films such as "The hills have eyes" This then makes the group seem to be worse then they actually are and almost as villains thus creating a negative view of the social group which in this case are students who are labelled. Which will then cause them to have a self fulling prophecy which means if a group is labelled a certain way then they will live up to that label which in turn will cause what the media created, a moral panic.

Using the theory of cultural hegemony by Gramsci 1930 which states that various social classes or groups have more authority over another person or group for example parents have authority over their children while the police have authority over the parents. So in this case with the tuition fees rising students are going to be less likely to afford their place at a university with most not being in a high class thus able to afford to go. This obviously means that the students will do whatever they can to get the decision to change so they almost reject the cultural hegemony and turn in on its head by fighting back with their riots. "Scotland Yard deployed more than 1,500 officers seven times the number on November 10 to control hordes of students smashing windows of government buildings and scrawling graffiti on the walls" this shows the idea that because the positions of power have changed the police must get reinforcements in order to calm the students thus showing the power change. It also shows that police officers are going to combat the students by force thus trying to take back their power which Gramsci states.

My final example is by Eldrige 1997 who states that the media reproduce the definitions of the powerful so in other words they only represent the ruling classes ideologies. The quote that i am going to use is probably one of the most graphic ones within the article "a female police officer suffered a broken hand and another officer had to be dragged out from a cordon with leg injuries" This quotation tries to make the students to appear to have no limits due to the fact that they hurt a female which is stereotypical a negative view as they are seen as innocent and vulnerable. We can see from this final point that the daily mail article had tried to represent students in a negative light while staying clear of the reasons that they caused a riot in the first place this suggests that they follow the ideologies of the government and thus take the attention away from their negative press by trying to cause a moral panic with the students to blame.