This paper explores the open and contested concept of moral panic over its 40-year history, exploring the contributions made by the concept's key originators, as well as contemporary researchers. While most moral panic researchers are critical, humanist, interpretivist, interventionist and qualitative, this paper highlights ten areas of productive dispute within and around the meaning of moral panic theory's 'common sense'. Such diversity of interpretation creates multiple possibilities for convergent and divergent theorization and research within a supposedly singular conceptual framework. This lack of closure and consequent diversity of political standpoints, intellectual perspectives and fields of empirical focus, rather than representing the weakness of the concept of moral panic, reflects and contributes to its successful diffusion, escalation and innovation.

This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four ''special reports'' or backgrounders on channel Five's Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.

The Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press invited a number of academics to address it on the subject of how ethics are taught on journalism courses at their universities. The evidence given on this subject was generally critical of the National Council for the Training of Journalists, and this evidence is resumed here. The article then goes on to address a related, but broader, issue posed by the inquiry, namely whether press freedom brings with it any obligations or responsibilities, particularly in respect of the democratic functions which the press is supposed to fulfill. The article argues that press freedom should consist of considerably more than the freedom of press owners, managers and editors to use their papers as they wish, and that the freedom of readers to access a wide range of trustworthy news and views should also be included in any truly democratic notion of press freedom.

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