Media's effect on moral development

A person with bad morals is likely to have a tough life; this is when moral development plays a role of being extremely important in a life of a human being. Morality is the key of  human mind that enables an individual to take moral decisions and actions between those that are right or wrong.

 Criticism often levelled against the media is that they are contributing to the decay of morality, which refers to the way people choose to live their lives according to a set of guidelines or principles that govern their decisions about right versus wrong. 

Media’s creation of moral panics has caused our society towards a big concern for the youth. Now-a-days as soon as we turn on the news, we are never short of a shocking scandal involving gangs of youths, kidnapping and assault. With these headlines popping up here, there and everywhere, stereotypes are gradually formed. However, every single youth of today really that dangerous, or are the media creating a moral panic. This is used to control the way in which the public behaves. The dangers of creating these moral panics are that they are continuously exaggerated in the media, which results in public concern constantly heightening. For example, the media frequently reports on criminal activity as it has a right to do. However, some believe that the media sensationalises crime so as to create moral panic and that this is used as a way of controlling how the public behaves.

Media usually has been portraying incidents and the happenings around to the society in such a way that they want the public to react to it in a panicky manner.

In recent years moral panic and media presentation have covered a wide-range of topics from HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s to asylum seekers into the UK in the 2000’s. This goes back as far as World War 1 when the wartime government used the media to portray the Germans in a certain manner in the hope of provoking a response. The same happened in World War 2. In this case, the media did not have to portray Hitler in a certain manner as the public already had its view on him. 

There is a deep connection between media and morality which has always been taken for granted, a movie Zero Dark Thirty, which tells the story of the tracking and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, has received several Oscar nominations but its attracting another kind of attention where it has been accused of influencing the point of view of right or wrong.

The media's act in launching certain perceptions of deviance, and have the power to create and instill particular thoughts towards certain groups within society.

There are journals, blogs and articles on the youth/teenagers or the future in terms of media, moral development, the working of internet by Ulises A. Mejias. Newspapers often point towards the debility of our society in regard to their reporting of moral panics, and repetitively refer back to the ‘good old days’.

This leads us to an on going concern that media is influencing the mind and working of the people, harming their moralities but also on the other hand media has got its good sights which has made it become the source of knowledge which enables us to get information of the activities around the world and creating a big impact on an individual's moral's.