ABSTRACT
Academic discourses about mass media are never entirely removed from those of journalism. Concepts like moral panic, and the notion of media texts as facilitators rather than causes of antisocial behaviour have been absorbed into popular journalism and were evident in the coverage of the Bulger case. But absorption is slow and it is perhaps no surprise that Buckingham’s contributors were not among those pundits wheeled out to comment on Jamie Bulger’s murder. One of them, Julian Wood, might have shed some light on the way in which working-class boys use video and, as a parttime worker at the British Board of Film Classification, his credentials would have been convincing. Unfortunately, his account of video watching might not have meshed easily with a journalistic discourse which seeks to identify and purge evil
titles. As the Childsplay series was press ganged into the Satanic canon, Wood might have suggested that demonizing texts only serves to increase their attraction as a means of testing individual resilience and cementing peer group solidarity. Locating a copy of Childsplay III and viewing it could well become a popular right of passage for adolescents. For adolescent girls, as Gemma Moss hints in her contribution to Reading Audiences, the adoption of ‘gory’ texts has already become a way of challenging the hegemony of the ‘soppy’ teen romances and questioning restrictive gender identities.
