Abstract
This paper investigates the representation of poverty during the 2015 UK general election campaign. The analysis is based on a corpus of articles published in the daily, Sunday and online editions of nine national newspapers. A framework combining the mainly qualitative approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with corpus-based techniques is used to address the following questions: which themes did the press foreground and background a) when poverty was mentioned explicitly, b) when it was referred to in terms of the welfare system and c) when the two were mentioned together in the same article? The main claim of this study is that explicit discussion of poverty in the media was infrequent during the campaign period, reflecting a lack of attention paid to poverty by politicians. Moreover, when poverty was mentioned, it was talked about as an international issue without tangible public impacts; this placed it firmly outside the arena of the general election campaign. Poverty was presented as a moral issue that must be ended, while the reduction of expenditure on benefits through welfare reform was posed as a necessity for the reduction of debt, and central to the general election campaign. I further argue that the press was able to send such contradictory messages about poverty and the welfare state by separating them into two parallel debates.
Highlights
There is no uncontentious definition of poverty, as its boundaries have shifted over time (Spicker, 2007)
This paper investigates the representation of poverty in nine national British newspapers during the 2015 UK general election campaign
This study focuses on the public debate about poverty in the United Kingdom during the 2015 general election campaign to investigate whether it was characterised by a biased coverage of benefit claiming and how this compared to explicit representations of poverty and poor people, that is to say, whether different ways of referring to poverty were associated with different representations
Summary
There is no uncontentious definition of poverty, as its boundaries have shifted over time (Spicker, 2007). This study focuses on the public debate about poverty in the United Kingdom during the 2015 general election campaign (won by the Conservative party) to investigate whether it was characterised by a biased coverage of benefit claiming and how this compared to explicit representations of poverty and poor people, that is to say, whether different ways of referring to poverty were associated with different representations To this end, it addresses the following questions: which representations did the press foreground and background a) when poverty was mentioned explicitly; b) when it was referred to in terms of benefit-claiming; and c) when the two were mentioned together in the same article? The dis cussion in this paper will be limited to the press
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