How the Media Manufactures Scapegoats to Sustain Moral Panic
From Terrorists to ‘Anti-Vaxxers’, the media uses fear and simplification to manufacture enemies and maintain control.
By Nick Holt | The Modern Enquirer
MORAL PANIC
“An episode, condition, person or group of persons that has been defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”
— Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972)
On the morning of December 15, 2014, a lone gunman took 18 people hostage inside a Lindt café in Sydney’s Martin Place. Within hours, the term “Sydney Siege” dominated headlines. A black flag pressed against the café window was misidentified by many media outlets as the Islamic State (IS) emblem. Front pages declared a terrorist attack.
By the time the gunman, Man Haron Monis, was killed—alongside two hostages, Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson—the Australian public had already been conditioned to believe they were witnessing an act of Islamic terrorism. Yet Monis had no verified ties to IS. His background revealed more about mental instability and personal grievance than religious extremism. But facts are rarely the drivers of moral panic. Narratives are.
This essay contends that the Australian media, through selective reporting and sensationalism, manufactured a moral panic during the 2014 Sydney Siege and later repeated similar patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Drawing on Stanley Cohen’s theory of moral panic, the evidence demonstrates how media outlets frame deviant acts to reinforce a simplistic story of order versus threat, with devastating social consequences.
Three months before the siege, on September 18, 2014, public alarm was already being seeded. Major outlets reported that Australia’s most senior IS member, Mohammad Baryalei, had initiated a plot to behead innocent civilians.
In a dramatic response, over 800 police officers conducted raids across the country, detaining 15 suspects. The ABC reported that Australia’s national terror alert level had been raised to “high.”
Cohen argued that a key element of moral panic is how deviance is reported: “A crucial dimension for understanding the reaction to deviance both by the public as a whole and by agents of social control is the nature of the information that is received about the behavior in question.” In this case, a suspected plot became proof of a larger, coordinated threat, amplified by media headlines and official warnings.
Within this media framing, Islamic extremism was cast as the enemy. The Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au, and other outlets repeatedly cited links to IS. Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed this narrative when he warned the public that “terrorists want to scare us out of being ourselves.”
Such statements by authority figures validated public fears and deepened the binary moral structure Cohen describes: us versus them, good versus evil.
When the Sydney Siege began, the groundwork had already been laid. The appearance of a flag, the gunman’s name, and his stated demands were enough to resurrect the same frame of fear.
Despite Monis’s actual history as a mentally unstable individual with no proven terror affiliations, News Limited published a 2pm special edition of the Daily Telegraph featuring the headline: “IS takes 13 hostages in city café siege.” The front page was widely condemned for disregarding police requests to avoid incitement.
The Daily Telegraph reaches a readership of nearly 300,000—making its choice of headline both influential and irresponsible. The misreporting of details, sensational imagery, and recurring references to IS created a distorted picture of reality.
This is what Cohen called the “deviance amplification spiral,” where a single incident is framed as part of a broader pattern, fueling public anxiety and reactionary policy.
The global response mirrored Australia’s. On December 16, the Sydney Morning Herald published an aggregation of international coverage under the headline: “Sydney Siege splashed across front pages of world newspapers.”
The New York Times, London Metro, and UK’s Independent carried headlines evoking Islamic terror. The language used reinforced division between the “innocent” and the “evil”—a key component in Cohen’s theory of moral boundary enforcement.
In the siege’s aftermath, media continued to imply a wider terrorist threat. On December 23, 2014, The Australian quoted Prime Minister Abbott warning of “heightened terrorist chatter” over the holidays.
The same day, MP Anthony Byrne suggested raising the threat level to “extreme.” This language furthered the perception of an ongoing crisis.
Cohen’s final stage of moral panic involves the perception of a crime wave. The Sydney Siege, though tragic, was treated not as an isolated event but as the latest chapter in an unfolding threat. The media’s repetitive framing, government rhetoric, and lack of corrective nuance made the panic self-perpetuating.
But this dynamic is not unique to Sydney or to terrorism. Moral panics have a long historical lineage. From the Red Scare of the 1950s, where McCarthyism cast suspected communists as existential threats to American democracy, to the AIDS panic of the 1980s that vilified gay men, societies have repeatedly manufactured folk devils in times of uncertainty.
The Satanic Panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, where innocent daycare workers were accused of ritual abuse, further illustrates the media’s power to distort fear into frenzy.
As philosopher René Girard argued, societies often maintain cohesion through collective scapegoating. In modern media ecosystems, this ritual is digital and dispersed, but no less violent. The media does not merely report a panic; it sanctifies the social sacrifice of the ‘other’ in the name of restoring order.
The same pattern would resurface during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of 2020–21, a new folk devil emerged: those who questioned or opposed government health mandates.
First, it was “anti-lockdown protesters,” then “anti-maskers,” and finally “anti-vaxxers.” These labels collapsed dissent into caricature. Instead of public debate, the media presented a moral binary: compliance versus defiance.
In doing so, the media created a scapegoat in place of the virus. Responsibility for continued lockdowns, hospital stress, and government overreach was increasingly shifted to non-compliant citizens. Once again, the nuance of motivation—medical, philosophical, political—was lost in the narrative of good and evil.
This shift was not incidental. The incentive structures of modern media reward emotional engagement over factual nuance.
In the attention economy, fear outperforms complexity. “If it bleeds, it leads” is not just a newsroom adage—it’s an operating principle. In this environment, folk devils become profitable content. The public becomes both consumer and participant in the moral drama.
Governments, too, benefit. Crises justify extraordinary measures. When the public is frightened, compliance is high. In this way, media and state become mutually reinforcing: the state supplies the threat; the media packages it.
Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent remains relevant: the press often functions less as a watchdog and more as a public relations arm for elite narratives.
Selective media practices do more than shape perception. They distort reality. When scapegoats are created, dialogue dies, and democratic pluralism gives way to moral hysteria.
Today’s folk devils may not carry black flags, but they wear digital ones: the unvaccinated, the ‘misinformation’ spreaders, the climate sceptics, or those who question foreign policy orthodoxy. Each iteration renews the media’s moral license to exclude, silence, and shame.
It is not the media’s role to manufacture enemies or inflame panic. Its duty is to inform with accuracy, restraint, and depth. When it fails, the result is not merely misinformation—it is moral manipulation.
When a society accepts manufactured panic as civic duty, it loses the capacity to distinguish fear from fact. The media, once a tool for public understanding, becomes an instrument of emotional coercion.
In such a climate, dissent is deviance, complexity is conspiracy, and the scapegoat—always familiar—is never far away.
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