Stan cohen.....Folk devils and moral panics

showed how agents of social control, particularly the police, 'amplified' deviance. They also demonstrated the media's rôle in this process and thus started to draw attention to the ideological rôle of the media in actively constructing meanings, rather than merely 'reflecting' some supposedly shared reality.

This approach was then developed by the Marxist critics of the media. Such studies were used to demonstrate how the media helped to avoid wider conflict in society by focusing our attention on the supposedly deviant behaviour of outsider groups, including youth 'gangs', 'welfare scroungers', trade union 'militants' and so on. By focusing attention in this way the media, it was claimed, contribute to creating and underpinning the social consensus on our society's core values. That view is well summarised below by Fowler:

Law and public opinion stipulate that there are many ideas and behaviours which are to be condemned as outside the pale of consensus: people who practise such behaviours are branded as 'subversives', 'perverts', 'dissidents', 'trouble-makers', etc. Such people are subjected to marginalization or repression; and the contradiction returns, because consensus decrees that there are some people outside the consensus. The 'we' of consensus narrows and hardens into a population which sees its interests as culturally and economically valid, but as threatened by a 'them' comprising a motley of antagonistic sectional groups: not only criminals but also trade unionists, homosexuals, teachers, blacks, foreigners, northerner, and so on.
Fowler (1991)

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Stan Cohen was the first theorist to address this prejudice towards the teen, his study of the Mods and Rockers in the 1960’s, led to the infamous ‘Folk Devils and Morale Panic’ theory. Cohen believed that young teens were presented in an unfair, negative way, and he perceived this societal indifference towards the teen and the government’s failure at controlling them, as "a condition, episode, person or group of persons [who] become defined as a threat to societal values and interests."