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Telling Stories: Sociology, Journalism and the Informed Citizen 169

populist journalism. Welfare, in the rhetorical mix which inevitably flows from
this combination, becomes a burden which we, the decent tax-paying, hard-
working majority, have to bear to support the inadequate and unscrupulous.
It soon became a recurrent refrain that benefits were being lavished on millions
who did not need them, and who lived a life of luxury on the proceeds. If some-
thing is too easily available and harmful to those who get it, the damage to the
national fibre is obvious, and the medical analogy this invites was soon to
appear. As a Daily Mail (26 September 1977) feature headed ‘The Welfare Junkies’
put it: ‘there is a dangerously addictive influence at work in the welfare system’.
Of course the implication is clear: there is a subplot in this story – the naturally
healthy state of the social organism is one without the plague of wide-scale
benefits; the welfare ‘cure’ is the root of the disease.
With the growing recession of the 1980s the wilder excesses of scroungerphobia
began to retreat. 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 dubi-
ous, was never allowed to subside. The language and vocabulary of the 1970s have
been a constant in more recent press reporting of this central area of social policy.
Still we read of the continuing battle to rid us of this burden of wasters, spongers
and loafers, in such stories as ‘War on the Something for Nothing Brigade – Big
Welfare Crackdown’ (Sun, 21 September 1987); ‘Hippy Dole Blitz’ (Daily Express,
8 August 1992); ‘Scroungers Will Be Nicked: It’s War on the Loadsamoney Lot’ (Daily
Star, 12 May 1988); ‘Stuff the Spongers’ (Daily Star, 8 October 1992).
This tirade was brought to a fine dénouement in the Sun’s splendidly public-
spirited new panel game ‘Shop a Scrounger’ (29 April 1993), in which readers
were given a phone line to provide the names of neighbours they suspected of
claiming undue social security.
Following that research I undertook a series of studies into the ways in which
the various components of the welfare state, and the policy apparatus generally,
were explained and conveyed to the electorate at large. Health, for example: ‘it’s
all sex and heart transplants in’ it’, as a tabloid friend explained to me, thus
saving major expenditure of time and money on endless content analysis to arrive
at the same conclusion. The pillorying of social workers (Golding, 1991), trun-
cated accounts of crime (in which massive over reporting of crimes against the
person has led to concern over public misapprehensions of criminality and the
legal system), and of fields like education, all began to build up a pattern. [...]
But the cumulative lessons of all this research, and that conducted by others,
point to a conclusion that, if predictable, is nonetheless alarming. What it high-
lights reflects concerns that are increasingly disturbing the more thoughtful of
journalism’s practitioners. Wherever we look, in coverage of race, industrial rela-
tions, welfare, foreign relations, or electoral politics, the media have failed
democracy. We live in a political society in blinkers.

A Wired Wonderwork: New Technology and the Social Order

But surely, this is an information society? We are deluged with information at
every turn. Aren’t new technologies locking us all into a new wonderworld in