Archive
Britain’s Unemployment Count – Deception !
In defence of benefit take-up statistics
Inclusion London commissioned the Glasgow Media Group and the Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research to carry out a study to analyse changes in the way the media are reporting disability and how it has impacted on public attitudes towards disabled people. The study highlights the following points:
There has been a significant increase in the reporting of disability in the print media with 713 disability related articles in 2004‐5 compared to 1015 in a comparable period in 2010‐11. This increase has been accompanied by a shift in the way that disability is being reported and there is now increased politicisation of media coverage of disability in 2010‐11 compared to 2004‐5;
• There has been a reduction in the proportion of articles which describe disabled people in sympathetic and deserving terms, and stories that document the ‘real life’ experiences of living as a disabled person have also decreased. Some impairment groups…
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Kicking the Poor
Recent months have seen the repetition of spurious statistics about 120,000 problem families. Fullfact have published their analysis of the derivation of this “figure” (see http://fullfact.org/factchecks/problem_families_costs_eric_pickles-27396) and this piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams explores these issues, with additional links to real research that does more than a flying visit to 16 families.
Financiers can lie and screw the economy, Newspapers can hack phones of murder victims, High level executives have memory recall problems, millionaires can be addicted to drugs, footballers can be racist and adulterous, and sexual abuse is not respecter of class, gender or colour. But Eric Pickles and the rest of the Compassionate Coalition can scapegoat the poor as feckless and needing state based intervention, even though we are trying to privatise as much as the state as possible…
