WELFARE AS A MEDIA TOPIC: THE CASE OF THE NEW YORK PRESS.
Item
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Title
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WELFARE AS A MEDIA TOPIC: THE CASE OF THE NEW YORK PRESS.
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Identifier
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AAI8409388
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identifier
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8409388
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Creator
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CABELL, CAROLYN JOYCE.
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Contributor
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Hylan Lewis
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Public and Social Welfare
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Abstract
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The New York Times and the New York Daily News were used as vehicles to examine the ideological and value dimensions of American welfare policies. The theoretical premise argues that the mass media are major carriers of ideology because they promote a consensual view of the world by heavily relying on the officials of government institutions for the raw materials of news and by their tendency to treat occurrences as unrelated, ahistoric events.;The American public welfare system is built on the social values that flow out of capitalist ideology; heavy emphasis is placed on individualism, self-reliance, competition, personal achievement, and the work ethic. The popular view of the welfare problem often focuses on the behavior of poor people and welfare programs usually contain rehabilitation and control of the poor as the necessary prescription for the poverty problem. This perspective forms the basis of the consensual paradigm as it relates to welfare; the primary objective for change in the welfare system is defined as the need to reduce welfare rather than to reduce poverty.;Although the Times and the News are substantially different in political orientation and audience, the expectation was that the characteristics associated with the consensual paradigm would predominate. A sample of editorials and articles about welfare that were published during the 1970s were analyzed. A series of hypotheses examined the nature and frequency of the topics discussed, the effect of politics on the news play given certain subjects, and the types of images of welfare recipients that emerge.;The preponderance of evidence pointed to the ideological nature of the coverage of welfare topics offered by the New York press. The major conclusion of the study is that the papers' presentations concerning welfare exhibit more similarities than differences. This is especially the case for their news articles. The near total exclusion of all information sources except officials of legitimate institutions skewed the news coverage to one interpretive framework. The heavy emphasis on events over issues rendered invisible the structural connections between the problems of poverty and welfare and the functioning of the economic and political systems.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
