Video Nasties

• Prime example of a media publicised ‘moral panic’ is the infamous 1980’s ‘video nasties’ campaign.
  
  Video Nasty definition
  
  - Mary Whitehouse (‘Defender of the public morals’) introduced the term video nasty in 1982, which was then to emerge as a press label within the same year.
  The phrase described an apparent influx of horrific and sickening videos that had arrived in the UK after the 1979 introduction of the VHS to the British market.
  
  The uproar began in May 1982:
  ‘…Sunday Times journalist Peter Chippendale published an article entitled ‘How High Street Horror Is Invading The Home’. “Uncensored horror video cassettes have arrived.
  
  - The newspapers wrote articles to shock and grab readers attention with extremist points of view.
  
  - murderers could use the excuse, and this would lobby press and public.
  





• The idiom of video nasty had entered the sub-consciousness of Britain, for a murderer to use the excuse that the press and lobbying groups were looking for was perfect.
  When the Mary Whitehouse and The Daily Mail supported Video Recording Act was passed in 1984, it was noted that a survey taken of the general public was less supportive than the press were keen to suggest.


• The government was comfortable with the massive distraction created by the press in order to prove to an unsure nation that they could actually be useful and prevent the public opinion descending towards apathy.



• The editorial then attempted to use its considerable voice to bring about a new ‘tough law’ even going as far as to print four of their own policies, and finishing with: ‘The Daily Mail, which has been in the forefront over the years exposing the obscenity of the video nasties, will not rest until this law is on the Statue book.


• ‘In the early years of the Thatcher government, a Britain driven by social and economical divisions, by the deliberate and barbaric dismantling, in half a decade, of an industrial working-class culture dating back two centuries, a Britain which, it sometimes seemed, was perpetually on the brink of meltdown, riot and class warfare, was further perturbed – or distracted – by dire warnings about a society of murderers and rapists driven into a frenzy by viewing video nasties. Actual fact and opinion were easily intertwined leaving the everyday reader, and especially the concerned parent, believing and wanting more information.


• Britain fought the last World War against Hitler to defeat a creed so perverted that it spawned such horrors in awful truth.

• Then in 1974 William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ came under a barrage of complaints which led to it’s eventual banning.

Hitler and Stalin possessed

• However, these cases paled in significance compared to the constant campaign headed by the right-wing Daily Mail and backed by other rival papers regarding the video nasties. The actual public could not be relied on.