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sider is then labelled by that society as a deviant or a folk devil as Cohen calls it. The outsider is isolated from 'normal' society and this leads to more deviance (Cohen, 1980:12; 18). Goode (1993:93) also defines moral panic as a 'widespread feeling on the part of the public that something is terribly wrong in the society because of the moral failure of a specific group of individuals, subpopulation is defined as the enemy. In short, a category of people has been deviantized.' Deviance refers to behaviour that breaks social values or upsets the expectations of society thereby attracting social penalty or punishment (O'Sullivan, et al., 1994: 83; Aggleton, 1987:4). Some examples of deviant behaviours that lead to moral panics are related to drug usage, homosexuality, gang activities, pornography, prostitution, and so on (Ben-Yehuda, 2009:2; Cohen, 1980:18). Cohen (1980:9; 59) observes that a type of moral panic which has kept occurring in Britain since the war has been tied to the coming up of a variety of youth culture who are either working class, middle class or students and are seen as deviants associated with violence. The Teddy Boys, the Mods and Rockers, the Skinheads, are some examples he gives of those labelled deviants or folk devils that represented youths at the time. This is also reflected in Ben-Yehuda's study of the 1982 drug panic in Israel where youths were identified with the deviant behaviour of illicit drug-taking.

Those who create and enforce the rules in society respectively referred to as 'moral entrepreneurs' by Becker (1963: 147) and 'social control agents' by Cohen (1980: 85). These are powerful concepts that are said to contribute to the development of moral panics in a society. They comprise the Police, the Courts and Civil Society or Action Groups who take appropriate action at the Federal and Local levels. Here the media also plays a vital positive role in checking the excesses of these so-called deviants. As we all know, the media is a tool through which information is dispensed to the public. The way and manner information is dispensed determines how the public reacts to such information. There are certain criteria that determine what 'news' is and it varies from one culture to the other (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 65). The criteria or guidelines by which events are regarded as newsworthy are referred to as 'news values' (Brighton and Foy, 2007:1). Galtung and Ruge (1965: 70) provide a list of a number of factors that qualify for news values. An event must possess at least one of these to qualify as news. One of such news values is 'amplitude' on which this essay will focus. Amplitude refers to how big the event is; 'The bigger, the better, the more dramatic, the more likely the event is to achieve...threshold value' (Watson, 1998: 118). It is argued here that 'amplitude' as a news value appears to be the major tool through which moral panics are developed in a society (Cohen, 1980: 31).

It was stated earlier that moral entrepreneurs or social control agents are powerful tools that are said to contribute to the development of moral panics. Cohen (1980: 166) and Becker (1963: 147) have argued that these tools create and enforce rules in order to control deviant behaviours. They intervene whenever they feel a particular value in societ本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。