'Moral panic' or 'cultural suasion?'

The article by Elisa Giomi and Fabrizio Tomello is decidedly intriguing and will undoubtedly foster future debates. The authors start from the definition of “moral panic” and the process on which the definition given by Stanley Cohen is rooted [Cohen, 1980]. On the basis of these premises, they address the problem of “proportionality” and try to explain when the attention given by the media to a social issue is disproportionate to its real diffusion and to the real threat it represents. The findings of the study, however, are not convincing and do not provide adequate arguments to answer the starting question for mainly methodological reasons.