ABSTRACT
The global financial crisis of 2008 seemed to coincide with a rise in stigmatising rhetoric about people in poverty and welfare recipients across a range of print and television media outlets. While the media reaction to the global financial crisis in the UK intensified anti-welfare rhetoric, such concerns about the numbers and morality of the poor and the unemployed are not new and can be traced back over many centuries. Stigmatising language about the poor frames people in poverty as members of an outgroup and associates poverty with negative stereotypes asserting immoral behaviour. Frequency of word use is an imperfect measure of stigmatising rhetoric because all of the words used in this analysis are polysemic even if they are primarily recognisable as words associated with poverty.
