Mass media: cultural effects

Golding: scroungerphobia

Peter Golding reports how he became interested in the mid-1970s in the fact that genuine poverty still existed in the welfare state and how the press reported it.

Gradually through this period the story we are told shifts from the problems of poverty to the crimes of the poor.

Golding (1994)

The themes which became prominent in the press at the time were:

• a need for a crackdown on the excesses of social security claimants. Military terminology was frequently used:
  Big New War on Dole Cheats (News of the World)
  War on the Welfare Scroungers (Daily Mail)
  Britain's army of dole-queue swindlers were on the run last night as a government minister warned he was gunning for them (Daily Mirror)
• news coverage played emotively on the distinction between the supposedly deserving and undeserving poor, the helpless and worthy on the one hand, the feckless and workshy, immoral and seedy on the other
• benefits were being lavished on millions who did not need them

Golding reports how the scroungerphobia began to subside in the recession of the early 80s, but

the ideology that had permitted and endorsed a major shift in the administration of social security from the promotion of benefits to people who needed them but don't claim, to the policing of the few whose claims were dubious, was never allowed to subside.

The campaign is still with us today despite the countless millions on the dole:

• War on the Something for Nothing Brigade - Big Welfare Crackdown (Sun 21/09/87)
• Hippy Dole Blitz (Express 08/08/92)
• Scroungers Will be Nicked: It's War on the Loadsamoney Lot (Star 12/05/88)
• Stuff the Spongers (Star 08/1/92)
• Shop a Scrounger (Sun 29/04/93)

Golding concludes:

Wherever we look, in coverage of race, industrial relations, welfare, foreign relations, or electoral politics, the media have failed democracy. We live in a political society in blinkers.

It is not at all clear by what mechanism the public may be influenced by the media to develop prejudices against certain social groups, but an interesting suggestion is made by Jonas et al (1995) in their discussion of experiments conducted by Staats and Staats (1958). Words were presented auditorially to subjects immediately after the visual presentation of a name of a nationality. The words presented auditorially had either positive or negative connotations (e.g. vacation, gift, bitter, failure). Dutch was systematically paired with positive words, Swedish with negative ones. When tested afterwards, subjects rated Dutch more positively than Swedish. Jonas et al suggest that the systematic pairing of certain social groups with negative information in the media may have an effect via a similar method of classical conditioning.

For an overview of each 'tradition', please click below:

Hypodermic needle model

Empiricism

Uses and gratifications

Recent developments

Back to the introduction to mass media effects

To display the complete glossary of terms for printing or copying to disk, please click here: