Media hypes, moral panics, and the ambiguous nature of facts. Urban security as discursive formation

Concepts like media hype and moral panic are often studied through a juxtaposition of public concern and actual ‘reality’. Drawing on my previous studies on moral panics about urban security in Italy, I illustrate how opinion polls and data on crime – the usual indicators for disproportionality – are more the result of changing practices, priorities, and defijinitions than ‘real life’ indicators. Foucault’s idea of discursive formation helps us to see these supposedly objective indicators as embedded in the same phenomena they are supposed to measure from the outside. Nonetheless, as long as they are conceived as statistics interacting with the forces that mould them, they can be important for the analysis of media hypes and moral panics.