Page 307 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 297
the local business communities, perturbed lest the sensationalism of the press
reports reduced the volume of their summer trade, were anxious that the
impression should be created, nationally, that, in future, such occurrences would
be well under control. As a consequence, there emerged—as evidenced in public
meetings, letters to the local newspapers—a number of ‘moral entrepreneurs’
who further amplified the media’s already exaggerated inflation of the ‘mods’
and ‘rockers’ problem by calling on the police and the courts to adopt new and
more severe strategies in relation to it. Tear-gas, more police, national service,
corporal punishment—all of these proposals were mooted and debated in the
columns of the local press.
The police, not surprisingly, were not unresponsive to the manifestation of
such a supportive climate of opinion at grass-roots level. Apart from cancelling
weekend leave so as to increase the police presence on the streets, Cohen records
that a variety of new tactics were adopted in an attempt to nip any potential trouble
in the bud, by what is known, euphemistically, as preventive police work. These
tactics included confining likely troublemakers to one part of the resort, usually
the beach; preventing people whose appearance suggested that they might be
‘mods’ or ‘rockers’ from congregating at certain previously designated ‘trouble-
spots’; the harassment of so-called potential trouble-makers by, for example, the
confiscation of studded belts as dangerous weapons or by giving them ‘free lifts’
to the roads leading out of town or to the railway station (see Cohen, 1972, p. 93
for details). Inasmuch as these tactics involved an infringement of the liberty of
the youths concerned prior to the actual commission of any offence, their
constitutional and legal propriety was questionable. The behaviour of certain of
the local magistrates, however, was perhaps even more disturbing. For,
sensitized to the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ menace by the media and by the crusading
activities of the local ‘moral entrepreneurs’, they seem not only to have passed
unduly severe sentences on the offenders brought before them and to have used
their power to remand in custody as a form of pre-trial additional punishment
but, particularly in the trials which followed the incidents at Margate over the
Whitsun weekend of 1964, to have used the court-rooms to further develop and
elaborate the dramaturgy of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’. This was particularly true of
one Dr. George Simpson, who gained a certain national fame—or notoriety—
through his harangues from the bench on the subject of hooligans and the
severity of the sentences he passed.
The attractiveness of Cohen’s study consists in the fact that it deals with the
effects of media definitions of reality not by regarding the media as isolable
variables whose discrete and differential influence must be precisely measured
and quantified. Rather, it places those definitions within a wider social process,
seeing the media’s practices as having consequences for and, in turn, being
influenced by the reality defining practices of other social agencies and
institutions—the police, the courts, local political and interest groupings and so
on. The effect that is attributed to the joint practices of such agencies and
institutions is that of the creation of an ‘amplification spiral’ whereby the scope