Media Hype, Imaginary Hobgoblins: Malcolm And Peter’s Politics Of Moral Panic

The media driven, politically exploited furore over ‘African crime gangs’ leads Ben Debney to wonder out loud who Australians should really be scared of.

“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote the famed US journalist H. L. Mencken in 1921, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Lacking both policies and the usual hobgoblins with which to menace the public as the war of terror has wound down and the boats have stopped, the federal Tories, long time stalwarts of this truism, have revealed their conspicuous illiberalism in the new year by launching a moral panic over African youth gangs in Melbourne.

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