Moral Indignation and the Media: An Analysis of the NVALA

Abstract

Analyses of moral indignation have seen it as generated by infractions of the conscience collective or by repressed envy or prurience. Such explanations seem of limited relevance to various contemporary moral crusades. Joseph Gusfield's theory of moral reform as a mode of status politics is explored in the context of an analysis of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association. Gusfield argues that assimilative reform which seeks to convert the deviant is replaced by coercive reform which seeks to constrain his behaviour by means of legislation when the supporters of a dominant morality find themselves increasingly abandoned by respectable groups and institutions. The sources of shifts in values away from the protestant ethic' values of an entrepreneurial middle class are located in a range of social and economic changes. The focus of NVALA's `protest against BBC television in particular is seen as developing from the spread of television as a domestic necessity and the shift in its ideological content in the post-Reithian era. The preoccupation of the NVALA with sexual morality is related to the close association between sexual restraint and economic and social position in Late Victorian middle-class society, an association undermined by the spread of an effective contraceptive technology. A major buttress to the link between sexual and social respectability has thereby been removed. A process of differential erosion of commitment to `respectable' middle-class morality is seen as having taken place, to which some groups and strata are seen as less susceptible and therefore more likely to provide the following of a movement such as NVALA. The failure of NVALA to halt the changes in the moral ethos of British society is seen as posing various problems with which the movement leadership seeks to cope, and as responsible therefore for various changes in strategy, the content of its message, and the scope of its aims.