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168 Communication Theory & Research
to the unification of Germany, most US papers devoted their front pages to the
divorce of Donald and Mrs Trump.
We accept that events are as they appear in newspapers, and increasingly on
television. That most televisual of dramas, the Gulf War, remains a recent high-
point of the subjection of information to the irresistible logic of news management
and the demands of TV. The introduction of tanks to the ground forces in the war
took place, said a government spokesman at the time, because ‘we need a force
that is militarily worthwhile, self-sufficient, and looks good on television’. This is
what you might call the breakfast-TV approach to campaign strategy. [...]

Telling Stories: News Media and Social Policy

In the mid-1970s I became interested in the way the media were responding to the
growing concern about poverty in affluent Britain. The so-called ‘rediscovery of
poverty’ 10 years earlier had come as a shock. What had been believed to be mere
pockets of remediable poverty amidst the generally rising living standards of the
post-war welfare state turned out to be, on closer inspection, intractable and large
proportions of the population – about seven million people, half of them children –
living on or below the poverty line. This needed explaining. The welfare state was
becoming more and more expensive; yet here was clear evidence of a problem
that refused to respond to the cure. Providing clear and acceptable explanations
is part of the media’s role, and together with Sue Middleton I began to examine
how this circle was being squared (Golding and Middleton, 1982).
Lengthy investigation of both press coverage and popular attitudes revealed
a number of themes, deeply rooted in the ancestry of British political culture and
practice, surfacing in the simplicities and mythologies of media portrayals. Some
old stories were being revisited. Gradually through this period the story we are
told shifts from the problems of poverty to the crimes of the poor, in a rewriting
of one of the core problems of the post-war welfare state.
Several themes among these stories became prominent and recurrent at this
time. First was the notion of a necessary crack-down on the excesses of social
security claimants. A number of headlines began to appear such as ‘Big New War
on the Dole Cheats’ (News of the World) or ‘War on the Welfare Scroungers’ (Daily
Mail, 25 July 1976). In the Daily Mirror, 22 September 1976, readers were advised
that there was a ‘War on Cheats’ being waged, recalling its own story a few
weeks previously beginning ‘Britain’s army of dole-queue swindlers were on the
run last night as a government minister warned he was gunning for them’. Such
language is terse, pithy and effective, redolent of the punchy adversarial jour-
nalism of the sports pages. The difference is that it defines the line of opposition
as that between society and a deviant minority, the social security claimant. Very
often a racist tinge is not far from the surface (Daily Star, 24 April 1991: ‘House
That for Cheek: Asian Family of 9 Jet Straight into Council Flat’).
Secondly, news coverage extracted from the national psyche the emotive dis-
tinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Social security policy has
always felt the need to sort the feckless and workshy, the immoral and seedy,
from the helpless and worthy. Classification is, equally, a popular sport in