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Decoding 'encoding'

Moral panics, media practices and Marxist presuppositions

University of New Brunswick, Canada

A generation ago, Hall et al.'s (1978) work Policing the Crisis gave a sophisticated analysis of the British media's mundane ability to 'encode' events so as to help produce a moral panic about mugging. Although this work remains relatively neglected in its home country, it has begun to be utilized for empirical analysis in North America. This article suggests, however, that Hall et al.'s analysis remains a poor import. This is not, however because of its age or cultural specificity. Instead Policing the Crisis fails, quite simply because it repeats in its own analysis the same 'ideological practices' (albeit at a higher logical level), which it discovered in its empirical investigation of the British media.

Key Words: codification • ideology • moral panic • Policing the Crisis • Stuart Hall

Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 12, No. 2, 191-221 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1362480608089240


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