The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism

> The Economist cites the case of Colin Wright, a post-doctoral student who had difficulty finding a job after publishing a series of essays “arguing that sex is a biological reality” (TERFese for “trans people don’t exist”).

TERFese? This is where I stopped reading. I don't want to engage with content where this sort of lazy name-calling passes for critical thinking.

I haven't read her piece, but it sounds like I would agree with Anne Applebaum's thesis. I agree there's something quite scary happening in society today with fringe elements on the left using shame and online bullying tactics to enforce a strict idealogical purity in spaces that used to be much more open to idealogical diversity. Can we call it idealogical terrorism? That's what it feels like.

I consider myself a moderate and I am definitely in the large share of people who feel afraid to share my true opinions on many issues. My workplace has been hijacked by a group of outspoken leftists who will get you fired if they catch the slightest whiff your non-conformity. I just keep my mouth shut.

> They are doing the same thing now, playing with the same fire that has pulled the United States rightward and backward over and over again for the last 40 years.

"Rightward and backward over the last 40 years"?

Its no wonder i disagree with so much of the rest of the author's points; we apparently inhabit different worlds.

This sounds like "we propaganda priests must not stray from the dogma even as the flames begin to toast our toes"

Any time someone trots out J.K. Rowling to demonstrate that this stuff isn't real, you know they aren't making a good faith argument. Obviously a billionaire isn't going to be deeply effected by a twitter mob. People are put off by incidents where a random nobody is filmed have some sort of melt down, the video is share context free, and that person loses their job, friends, etc.

It's the willingness of employers to bow to twitter pressure and fire people that is truly terrible, especially in the US where health insurance is tied to employment.

> The most obvious problem here is the wording of the question. “Offensive” is a term almost exclusively associated with the political left. Conservative media has spent years reinforcing the idea that feminists, minorities and college students are too easily offended. When conservative throw tantrums— Dr. Seuss, face masks, Lil Nas X, the “war on Christmas,” we could do this all day — their paroxysms are almost never described using the O-word.

The author clearly has biases of his own, but this is actually an interesting point I hadn't really thought about. If we replace the word "Offensive" with something like "Disrespectful" or something we might completely flip the results, so the very question is politically primed to begin with.

Unconvincing. The author ignores the most egregious examples of cancel culture in order to argue their case. See:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow...

The author apparently defines 'moral panic' as any negative press attention on a social movement they personally approve of.

The author is misunderstanding why the "illiberal left" is discussed nowadays and tries to debunk a number of examples but fundamentally fails.

The most telling is an attempt to debunk a claim by the Economist -- specifically by pointing to the fact that the same survey that finds "68% felt that students cannot say what they think because their classmates might find it offensive" also finds that "74% oppose campus policies restricting political views offensive to minority groups."

That second statistic doesn't really refute the first one, or even mitigate it. It really drives home the point that the number of people who believe in things that the "illiberal left" does isn't a majority of Americans, yet that segment of the population still exerts an outsize social pressure and has greater power in society than their numbers might imply.

The risk isn't that they will come to control political power and implement book banning and the like, but rather that society will increasingly self-regulate in an attempt to appease them.

Disingenuous and chock-full of the same type of moral panic (directed squarely at one side of the American political aisle) it claims to debunk. How did this partisan hackery make it to HN?

For the record, the poor lady suffered 6% third-degree burns. The "over ten percent" includes more minor burns. A small detail, but it raised my suspicion that the author was putting his thumb on the scales to make his point stronger.

And it was a terrible verdict, by the way. It's common knowledge that coffee is brewed with boiling water and very often served immediately thereafter. The supposed "moral panic" story only had legs precisely because every reasonable person knew that the jury had been buffaloed by some (apparently, very good) lawyers in the unfamiliar context of a courtroom. One does not need to hold a brief for McDonald's to understand that.

Note the author's subtle toggling between denying a phenomenon exists, and then smugly implying that it does and should.

>The Economist cites the case of Colin Wright, a post-doctoral student who had difficulty finding a job after publishing a series of essays “arguing that sex is a biological reality” (TERFese for “trans people don’t exist”).

The author writes about a "congressional candidate who body-slammed a reporter", which is fair enough, but not the whole story -- that congressional candidate won their race and served in Congress and is now a Governor who body-slammed a reporter.

This faults the media for a widespread misunderstanding and starts with two examples of “the media” getting the story right (AP & WSJ) and an example of a Republican misrepresenting a case to get some cheap laughs and enough outrage to motivate his audience to vote (Ronald Reagan).

So how is it “the media’s” fault/ Or is it maybe possible that some stories, like the hot-coffee-saga, are just too good not to share, if you leave out a few inconvenient facts?

I think the author betrays their own political bias here, as journalism has become infused with over-the-top moral panics across the board. We've replaced single-issue moral panics with moral panics about nearly everything. We have a moral panic about racism, anti-racism, anti-anti-racism, transphobia, radical trans activists, the covid vaccine, the people who are skeptical of the covid vaccine, etc etc.

It's a bit parochial to talk about moral panic journalism and only hone in on one specific subset of it.

Excellent and illuminating article. We've all seen this script before.