Negative portrayals of welfare recipients in the UK press are in contrast to the positive stories which dominate Swedish and Danish mass media

Portrayals of welfare recipients in the mass media have the potential to influence the way in which audiences think about them. Christian Albrekt Larsen uses a large sample of newspaper articles from the UK, Denmark and Sweden to analyse the positive and negative portrayals of the poor and welfare recipients in the press. He argues that the level of poverty and the reach of welfare systems in a society influence the number of negative newsworthy stories about welfare recipients.