ABSTRACT
Toynbee's second observation, that social policy 'makes news' when there is a crisis, tells only part of the story. What Toynbee neglects to mention is how
frequently media reporting is central to the construction as well as the reporting of crises. Headlines such as 'Fraud busters make a dawn swoop on welfare scroungers' (Sunday Mirror, 29 March, 1998) and '£2 bill ion blitz on dole cheats' (Daily Mail, 10 July 1995) transform the social problem of unemployment into a public crisis, i f not moral panic, about welfare scroungers (see Chapter 9). Sun headlines denouncing '£200-a-day beggars' (28 October 1998) similarly shift the problem of homelessness into a crisis about beggars or, in Jack Straw's widely reported phrase, 'aggressive beggars, winos and squeegee merchants' (see Chapter 6). Policy discussions about the growing number of lone mothers are likewise reconstructed in media discourses into an alleged crisis posing both moral and financial threats to society. The programme title 'Babies on Benefit' betrayed much about the assumptions informing Panoramas approach to this policy issue (20 September 1993). The media judge black lone mothers to pose a particular threat: a Sunday Express feature, headlined 'The ethnic timebomb', claimed that 'almost six in ten black mothers are bringing up children on their own, urged on by the benefit system' (13 August 1995) (see Chapter 15).
