Reason‘s gallery of the ten most absurd moral panics to make Time cover stories is a joy to behold. The infamous mid-90s “cyberporn” cover—a perfect storm of Internet FUD for the tech-illiterate and “won’t someone think of the children” hysteria—has long been synonymous with the very concept of “moral panic” in my mind, but it turns out there’s a whole treasure trove in Time’s archives, from the burgeoning satanic cult menace to the insidieous threat of… Pokemon? Pokemon. For serious.
Time for a Moral Panic!
June 11th, 2009 · 5 Comments
Tags: Journalism & the Media
5 responses so far ↓
1 Dan Summers // Jun 11, 2009 at 8:46 am
Wait, what? That Satanic cult menace isn’t real? You mean those menacing stories I heard in Sunday school about being ritually disemboweled were wrong?!
Seeing that piece in Reason makes me clap my hands with child-like glee. Just about all of them document a major call to arms in the very conservative evangelical church of my youth, and I’m probably enjoying seeing them skewered more than is absolutely healthy.
2 Doug // Jun 11, 2009 at 1:00 pm
That’s a fun piece. Has Time done one yet on bloggers complicating America’s minds? What about the children?
3 The Other Anderson // Jun 11, 2009 at 2:05 pm
The gallery would probably be much more entertaining if the cover images actually loaded.
I suppose IE 6.0 is to blame. It always is.
4 Time Magazine: Thinking Of The Children For Forty Years « Around The Sphere // Jun 13, 2009 at 12:17 pm
[…] Julian Sanchez […]
5 Time for a Moral Panic « Neko Bijin’s Serious Blog // Jun 19, 2009 at 8:37 am
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