Mean World Syndrome 

Mean world syndrome is violence portrayed through media. This means that, in every change of the channel we are often exposed to something violent or rude. Due to what we see in the media we automatically judge people we see at night or we don't want to walk down the street at night. For example, a boy walking down the street at night with his hood up could represent a gang member or someone who is going to trouble you. But in most cases this is not true, he may be walking to the bus stop and is simply just cold? Although, due to what we see on television our instincts now tell us that he is dangerous.

Statistics  show that people who watch more television are more afraid than people who watch less television. This is because, the people who watch the television more see the horrible stories on the news and watch the horrible programmes that stereotype 'criminals' making us afraid to see certain people when we are on the street. This results in fear and mean world syndrome. Whenever watching the news we see more violence and horrible stories that positive stories. This is because, ITV and BBC want to engage their viewers, they want everyone to watch and pay attention using horrid stories accomplishes this as people are nosy and want to see what is going on and where to see if it effects them. Whereas, doing a story on the field with a million flowers will bore people as they are not interested or do not care.

Mean world syndrome ends up making the public resent the government and the world in general as we blame the government for all of our problems.

Moral Panic

The television programme such as the news often expose people to horrific stories. For example, Charlie Brookers News wipe. This clip shows the news talking about a gun shooting in a local school. For starters this creates mean world syndrome. Following on from this the news shows clips of this man at a bank and playing ping pong? This is not needed as we do not see a clear image of his face all this is doing is creating moral panic. This results in, people thinking that everyone with the same back of the head as this mass murder is now going to kill or harm you.

Including photography of the killer and making the news story 24 hour coverage, as well as making the killer famous will make things so much worse. This is because, when its blown up and intense coverage of a story there is usually more in the following week due to how famous this killer now is. Whereas, if the news story was just exposed to the surrounding community and then made boring to the rest of the world then maybe no one else would copy because its boring and didn't attract any attention. Panicking and exposing all information will simply only make things worse.