Abstract
It has been well-established that, in the USA, the news media contributes to the construction of moral panics regarding the use and users of various types of drugs. In this study, we utilize the moral-panic framework to understand how the media depicts drug use in Malaysia. We used content analysis of two widely read English-language Malaysian newspapers to explore how drug use and drug users are depicted and portrayed. Broadly, we find that Malaysian news media tends to overemphasize legal issues while underemphasizing health issues associated with drug use, drug treatment, and harm reduction interventions. This type of coverage has likely contributed to a moral panic surrounding drug use in Malaysia.
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Notes
We understand that using the word “drug” may miss some articles, but since it is a common word for controlled substances, many regulatory agencies have the word in their organizational name, and media articles in Malaysia frequently mention the Dangerous Drugs Act, other than compiling a long list of individual drug names (reporters will in different stories use different substance names for the same substance) and individually searching for those substances, which could potentially add a host of other methodological problems, we thought using “drug” as a search term was the best manner to search for these substances.
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Singh, D., Webb, M., Hayden Griffin, O. et al. Examining Media Coverage of Drugs in Malaysian Media. Asian J Criminol 16, 377–394 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-021-09344-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-021-09344-5