The rhetoric of recessions: how British newspapers talk about the poor when unemployment rises, 1896–2000

Daniel McArthur and Aaron Reeves

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Recessions appear to coincide with an increasingly stigmatising presentation of poverty in parts of the media. Previous research on the connection between high unemployment and media discourse has often relied on case studies of periods when stigmatising rhetoric about the poor was increasing. We build on earlier work on how economic context affects media representations of poverty by creating a unique dataset that measures how often stigmatising descriptions of the poor are used in five centrist and right-wing British newspapers between 1896 and 2000. Our results suggest stigmatising rhetoric about the poor increases when unemployment rises, except at the peak of very deep recessions (e.g. the 1930s and 1980s). This pattern is consistent with the idea that newspapers deploy deeply embedded Malthusian explanations for poverty when those ideas resonate with the economic context, and so this stigmatising rhetoric of recessions is likely to recur during future economic crises.

Keywords: poverty; print media; recession; stigma; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2019-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-his and nep-hme
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Sociology, 1, December, 2019, 53(6), pp. 1005 - 1025. ISSN: 0038-0385

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100546/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:100546

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().