‘A tide of homeless, drug-addicted and mentally ill people’: Representing homeless people in MailOnline content

Abstract

Councils across England are warning of a rise in the number of homeless people as Covid-19 pandemic protections such as the eviction ban are withdrawn (Watts et al., 2022). At the same time, research suggests that more people in England could become homeless by 2024 due to, inter alia, the cost-of-living crisis (The Guardian, 2022). This paper considers how homeless people and homelessness are represented in the biggest UK online news brand, MailOnline. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, it unveils the consistent dehumanisation, criminalisation and pathologisation of homeless people in articles published in 2021. Through a micro-linguistic analysis, it uncovers the discursive strategies used by journalists to represent homeless people negatively, such as functionalisation, individualisation, the use of statistics, and metaphors of natural disaster. The paper argues that these representations could contribute to a moral panic surrounding homelessness at a time when one might expect greater understanding due to the potential rise in homelessness. More research is needed to understand the ways in which these discourses map onto homelessness policies and are received by members of the British public.