Drugs & Dance

Creating images is a cultural process. Media are part of this process. The media images reflect the cultural values of a society. The creation of images in the media is not only influenced by culture, but also by journalists, editorial staff, businesses, and institutions. The media sometimes spread negative, exaggerated stories about a subject or event, to create a moral panic. The subject or event is framed by the media to create a negative image. In the nineties of the twentieth century moral panic was created by the media about the dance scene and the drug ecstasy. Both the dance music and ecstasy were relatively new aspects of society and the risks of the drug were still unknown to most people. Currently the novelty has gone. Dance has made its way from underground subculture to popular culture and ecstasy turned out to be not so dangerous. Still, drugs are an unaccepted part of society. Although the moral panics about dance and drugs are gone, drugs still have a negative image. In this master thesis research has been done about the images of Dutch dance festivals in the media in Holland. The research question is: What images are created about the four largest dance festivals by the five largest newspapers between 2004 and 2008 and what image in particular is created about drugs in these articles? The results show that most research units are about the creativity of the festivals; the music, the artists, the decors. Another large part of the research units are about the commercial part of the festivals. Only few research units are about the atmosphere or about drugs. The greater part of the research units about all the topics, except for drugs, are positive. The creativity of dance festivals is the most positive topic, almost no research units about creativity is negative. However, more than half of the research units about drugs were negative. So the significant findings of the research are: overall, newspapers are positive about dance festivals and not too much attention is given to drugs in the articles. Although, the attention that the newspapers did pay to drugs, is mostly negative. This corresponds with the theoretical part of the thesis. The images created by the media reveal the cultural values of a society. Given that dance is part of popular culture, but drugs is still unaccepted by society, it was to be expected that most images found of dance festivals are positive, but the image of drugs is mostly negative.