ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the news media framing of the debates around the merits of masks (or ‘face coverings’) in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. It adopts an approach derived from critical discourse analysis to investigate an initial sample of over 2400 UK national newspaper items (via Lexis/Nexis) and argues that the media debate can be understood as reflecting two competing moral panic discourses. The first (‘mutuality’) asserted the moral duty to wear a mask in public, constructing anti-mask proponents as a deviant ‘other’ and championing health officials and medical practitioners' calls for the wearing of masks. This moral discourse emphasized the needs of those seen as vulnerable and marginalized over the personal freedoms of selfish individuals to assert a kind of ‘social contract’. Conversely, the second moral panic (‘Freedom’) advocated a ‘libertarian’ approach focused on individual liberties and framing masks (‘muzzles’) as a tyrannical form of social control which were both ineffective and the cause of other social and health risks because of unintended consequences. The deviants in this perspective are those who unwittingly or otherwise accept or invite an authoritarian governmental over-reach. The chapter illustrates with examples of these two competing moral panics.
