Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
This chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the construction of Muslims in
the British press, namely the issue of Muslims claiming benefits from the
British government. The subject of Muslims who claim benefits potentially
combines two sets of concerns that arose in the United Kingdom during the
period under examination: one about (unwanted) Muslims in the country, the
other about people who were perceived as work-shy or ‘scroungers’, who
received large amounts of government benefits that they were seen as not
deserving. In this chapter we trace how this combination of concerns
appeared; which newspapers helped to nurture it, and to what extent did
those newspapers influence the reporting of others? We also investigate
which sorts of Muslims were viewed as ‘fair game’ for this sort of reporting
and how this changed over time.
There were a number of reasons why it was decided to focus on this
particular topic. First, stories about two particular Muslims who received
benefits, Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri, had been identified as significantly
frequent in the tabloid part of the corpus (Hamza and Bakri were keywords –
see Chapter 3). A pilot project (Baker 2010), which used a smaller dataset,
had also found these two words to be key. The pilot study did not examine
articles containing these names in detail, but this discrepancy in their fre-
quency was felt to represent an interesting difference between broadsheet and
tabloid news reporting. Additionally, reference to financial concerns has been
identified by critical discourse analysts as tending to be a feature of racist
discourse. Van Dijk (1987: 58) describes four topic classes for racist dis-
courses: they are different, they do not adapt, they are involved in negative
acts and they threaten our socio-economic interests. Additionally, Karim
(2006: 119–20, emphasis in original) notes four primary stereotypes of
Muslims: ‘[H]aving fabulous but undeserved wealth (they have not earned
it), being barbaric and regressive, indulging in sexual excess, and the most
persistent image of the “violent Muslim”.’ Golding (1994) has also identified
news articles about benefit recipients as typical of ‘scroungerphobia’,
177
178 From hate preachers to scroungers: who benefits?
Method
The corpus was split into 144 subsections, each containing news articles from
a single paper in a particular year. As noted at the start of Chapter 4, we were
not able to obtain articles for some newspapers between 1998 and 2000.
While this may impact on overall frequencies for the different newspapers,
and it should make us wary about reading too much into frequencies for the
1998–2000 period, it should be noted that, of the data that was available
Method 179
during this period, there were very few articles about Muslims receiving
benefits, so it is unlikely that this pre-9/11 period would have provided large
numbers of stories even if all the data had been available to us.
A search term was created in order to identify news articles that referenced
people who were receiving benefits. This term was initially developed
through introspection. Then a number of sample articles were read in order
to identify further terms that may have been missed. The final search term was
scroung*/dole/handouts/benefits/welfare, with the * symbol standing for any
sequence of characters. It should be noted that the search term contains words
that tend to characterise benefit claimants in negative ways – particularly
scroung* (which elicits scrounger, scroungers, etc) and handouts. On the
other hand, the terms benefits and welfare did not implicitly hold such
negative connotations, although it was later found that they were sometimes
used in negative contexts. Additionally, in some articles these terms appeared
to be used interchangeably:
HOOK-handed cleric Abu Hamza is to sue welfare bosses for thousands of pounds in
extra state hand-outs, The Sun can reveal. Hamza, due in court next month on
incitement to murder charges, reckons he has been fiddled out of benefits worth
£200 a week for nearly three years (Sun, 21 December 2004).
Concordances of this search term were carried out across the sub-corpora
separately. Each concordance line was then examined in order to ascertain
whether it referred to Muslims who were receiving benefits. Some cases
needed to be discounted, either because the word dole referred to a person’s
surname (e.g. Bob Dole) or because they referred to non-Muslims on benefits.
There were also articles that referred to asylum seekers receiving benefits.
These articles, too, were discarded unless it was clear that the asylum
seeker in question was also a Muslim. Articles that referred to a person by
name were included if the person in question was known to be a Muslim, or
was referred to as a Muslim, or it was strongly implied that he/she was a
Muslim elsewhere in the article (when expanded concordance lines were
examined). Articles that referred to an unnamed Muslim or Muslims in
general receiving benefits (either in hypothetical or actual cases) were
included. After all the irrelevant articles had been set aside, the frequency
of references to Muslims receiving benefits was calculated.
As the concordance lines from each newspaper and time period were
examined, it was possible to notice trends over time, as well as identifying
particular Muslims who were frequently described as being on benefits. We
were particularly interested in how newspapers used evaluation in such
stories, and we tried to identify evaluation strategies from the concordance
lines, as well as focusing on patterns of referencing – such as when news-
papers quoted from other newspapers.
180 From hate preachers to scroungers: who benefits?
Results
Table 7.1 shows the frequencies of the words in the search term for each
newspaper, tabulated by time period.
A couple of points need to be made about this table. First, it does not tell us
how many articles were written about Muslims on benefits. Instead, it tells us
about overall references to Muslims on benefits. The data is presented in this
way because a single article may contain multiple references to Muslims on
benefits, thus strengthening a cognitive model or representation of Muslims in
a certain way. Additionally, the table does not take into account the relative
frequencies of these occurrences in relation to the overall number of words
that each newspaper printed in each year. As noted elsewhere, the tabloids
contain less text overall than the broadsheets. As a result, it could be argued
that the higher frequencies found in some of the tabloids are particularly
salient. However, for the purposes of this chapter, we are more concerned
with overall frequencies. We want to consider the following: if a person reads
every issue of The Sun (or another newspaper) for a given year, how many
times will he/she read about a Muslim (or Muslims) receiving benefits? How
many times does the newspaper link the two concepts (Muslims and benefits)
together in the course of one year?
In total, there were almost 2,000 references to Muslims receiving bene-
fits during the period examined. Clearly, this is a topic that the British
press (or at least some parts of it) found to be newsworthy during the first
98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 Total
decade of the twenty-first century. However, this figure does not take into
account the fact that these references were not evenly distributed across
newspapers or over time. The newspapers that referenced Muslims receiv-
ing benefits the most were all right-leaning tabloids: the Daily Express,
The Sun and the Daily Mail. These newspapers all referenced Muslims on
benefits at least 400 times in the period under examination together
accounting for 79.8 per cent of all such references in the corpus as a whole.
Another set of newspapers also had moderately frequent references: three
tabloids, The People, the Daily Star and the Daily Mirror, and two right-
leaning broadsheets, The Daily Telegraph and The Times. During the
period under examination these newspapers each referred to Muslims on
benefits between forty-two and 149 times. A third set of newspapers had
hardly any references to Muslims on benefits. These were all broadsheets:
The Business, and three left-leaning newspapers, namely The Guardian,
The Independent and The Observer. None of these newspapers made more
than nine references to Muslims receiving benefits within the twelve-year
period covered in the corpus. The Independent was particularly notable, as
no such articles were found. Such a topic can therefore be considered to
have no or little ‘news value’ to the writers (and readers) of left-leaning
broadsheets, although it would appear to be of much more interest to the
right-leaning tabloids.
In terms of the distribution of such references over time, another pattern
can be observed. The first three years considered (1998 to 2000) show very
few references to Muslims on benefits, even in the right-wing tabloids
(although, to an extent, this could be attributed to the fact that we could not
obtain a full set of data for these years). There are then three surges of
interest in the subject, in 2001, 2003 and 2005. After each peak, the
following year shows a reduction, although each peak is stronger than
the one preceding it. There is a further, smaller, peak in 2008. However, the
bulk of the references occur in 2003 or afterwards. Table 7.1 shows
that the peak point for articles about Muslims on benefits comes in 2005,
the most prolific year for this topic for six newspapers, when almost a
quarter (24.1 per cent) of all corpus articles on Muslims on benefits occur.
Even The Guardian and The Business have the most references to Muslims
on benefits during 2005.
It is likely that the first peak in 2001 is attributable to the response to the
9/11 terrorist attacks, whereas the peak in 2005 is attributable to reaction to
the 7/7 bombings of London transport, as at these points there is a general rise
in stories about Muslims. It is notable that articles published during these
periods make an explicit link between victims of the terrorist attacks and a
small set of Muslims receiving benefits, particularly those believed or found
to be involved in the attacks:
182 From hate preachers to scroungers: who benefits?
Qatada had been claiming £400 a week in state benefits but his social security
payments were stopped and his bank account frozen after his name appeared on a
US list of terrorist suspects. Treasury investigators seized £180,000 in cash – believed
to help fund the terrorist network – from his home last month (Sunday Express,
16 December 2001).
[I]f these fanatics hate the West so much, why are they still here and claiming benefits?
(Daily Mirror, 23 September 2001).
PLANS to slash benefits for London bomb victims, while the families of
extremists continue to receive state handouts, were attacked last night (Daily Express,
12 September 2005).
The following sections examine how Muslims on benefits are constructed,
looking in more detail at change over time and between newspapers.
However, during this period, when such Muslims are referred to, their
religion almost appears to be secondary to the fact that the people in question
are asylum seekers above all, as indicated by the following Daily Mail article:
An asylum seeker with two wives and 15 children has received more than £32,000 in
benefits while his case is being considered. The Algerian family, headed by Moham-
med Kinewa, who is in his 60s, arrived 15 months ago. They have also been given the
use of two fully-furnished four-bedroom houses with satellite TV, one for each wife
The tabloids find their villains 183
and her children. They receive £617.72 a week in benefits alone. The yearly estimated
cost rises to more than £50,000 when council tax relief, educating the school-age
children, translators, solicitors, and English classes for the family are taken into
account (30 March 2000).
In a 1998 article entitled ‘London ban on four Egypt terror suspects’, the
Daily Mail refers to a terrorist group that claimed responsibility for a
massacre in Luxor in 1997. In the seventh paragraph, the article links an
asylum seeker called Yasser al-Serri to the group:
Three of the other four are seeking asylum, including Yasser al-Serri, 35, unemployed
and receiving benefits (31 March 1998).
Again, here the focus does not seem to be on the fact that al-Serri is
receiving benefits, but the article instead appears to foreground the fact that
the terrorists were Muslims, which is referred to in the first sentence of the
article. The fact that al-Serri is receiving benefits is therefore secondary to
the fact that he is an asylum seeker who is suspected to be linked to terrorism,
although after 9/11 Yasser al-Serri assumes more prominence in stories about
benefit recipients.
However, it is before 9/11 that we first find references to one of the most
well-known ‘scroungers’, Omar Bakri Mohammed. An article by The People,
in 2000, reports: ‘A British charity run by Islamic Fundamentalists which
trains young men to get involved in “Holy Wars” has had its special privileges
revoked.’ The article then quotes Bakri’s response:
Omar Bakri Mohammed said: ‘It gives the impression that the British Government is
an enemy. That sort of attitude could lead some people to carry out violent acts.’ By
rights he should be chucked out of the country for uttering threats like that. But of
course he won’t be and will probably get benefits instead (16 January 2000).
Although Bakri was receiving benefits, the article only tangentially refers to
this. This was not the case with a letter to the Daily Mirror on 27 August
1998, in which Bakri is described as ‘nothing but a rich scrounger’. Clearly,
some readers and reporters were aware of Bakri, although at this point he
had not yet gained national notoriety in the press. This was set to change
after 9/11.
(the majority occurring in the final quarter of the year), then only twenty-three
in 2002, while the first big peak came in 2003 (241 articles). A possible reason
for this ‘delayed’ response could be that the newspapers had bigger fish to fry.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and the year following it, there was a
huge media focus on the founder of al-Qaeda, the group that carried out the
9/11 attacks: Osama Bin Laden. He received 19,470 mentions in our corpus in
2001 and a further 5,525 in 2002. References to him decreased even more
in 2003, to 3,489, and by 2009 they had slid to 1,092. In the immediate weeks
after 9/11 some articles appeared optimistic that Bin Laden would soon be
caught: ‘We can find bin Laden in days, say guerillas’ (Daily Telegraph,
3 October 2001). However, as the weeks and months passed, the discourse on
finding Bin Laden became increasingly incredulous:
You may remember Tone’s confident answer to the question: ‘Will you catch Bin
Laden?’ – ‘Yes...of that I have no doubt.’ It then turned out – funny how information
about this operation trickles out in dribs and drabs – that we could be facing an army of
10,000 Al Qaeda fanatics, maybe even double that number, prepared for a bitter
guerilla war (Daily Mail, 21 March 2002).
Bin Laden evaded American forces until 2 May 2011, and therefore, during
the years after 9/11, we would argue that some British newspapers began to
turn their attention towards people who were more accessible and could be
seen as having similar ideologies. Focusing on such people who were living in
the United Kingdom therefore gave the British press a more tangible set of
villains to focus on. At the beginning of this ‘campaign’, such villains tended
to be either terrorists, terrorist plotters, Muslims linked to terrorist groups or
Muslims who held politically extreme views. They were also often asylum
seekers. ‘Hate preachers’ Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri were given prominent
attention. Robin Richardson (2004: 66–7) reports how Hamza in particular
represented a ‘top attraction’ for the British media: ‘Here, just waiting for an
unquestioning press, was a villain straight out of central casting. He has an
eye patch, a hook replacing an amputated hand, a claimed association with
Taliban training camps and a knack for issuing blood-curdling threats.’
EVIL hook-handed Muslim cleric Abu Hamza is using a legal trick to delay getting the
boot from Britain for THREE years and rake in thousands more in hand-outs (People,
21 March 2004).
RANTING Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed pulled off another handouts coup
by claiming disability benefit to get a £28,000 car, complete with satellite navigation
system. Yet he walked into the showroom with barely a limp. Readers – some of them
disabled but refused lesser benefits – are appalled (Sun, 16 May 2005).
THE mastermind behind the July 7 bombings raked in nearly £5,000 in sick leave pay
while plotting the massacre which killed 52 innocent people. Mohammad Sidique
Khan, 31, was signed off from his primary school teaching job as he planned Britain’s
worst terror atrocity. The benefits cheat even travelled to Pakistan while claiming up to
£250-a-week in sick pay – effectively funding his double life as an Islamic extremist
with council taxpayers’ money (Daily Express, 1 February 2006).
A MUSLIM extremist who advocates indiscriminate terror bombing has just been given
a £400,000 council home from which to launch atrocities on the British people. The
three-storey London town house provides superbly comfortable living for Abtul
Lakhouane, who draws £300 a week benefits for himself and his family of six. And
the icing on the cake for the dangerous Moroccan fanatic is that, under the right-to-buy
scheme, he is entitled to purchase it – as he fully intends to do – for the knockdown price
of £89,000, giving him a potential £311,000 profit (Daily Express, 29 September 2002).
Hate on handouts… A FANATICAL preacher of hate has been recorded urging
impressionable young British Muslims to go to WAR against our troops. Yet, sicken-
ingly, crazed cleric Anjem Choudary and his wife rake in more than £25,000 a year in
welfare BENEFITS – while he plots to destroy British society (Sun, 23 March 2008).
The tabloids (particularly the Daily Mail, The Sun and the Daily Express)
refer to Britain’s welfare state in terms of it being too big (belching, swollen,
bloated, vast, enormous, expensive, over-stretched, sprawling, monster), too
kind (cushy, generous, compliant, cosseting, lax) and inefficient (creaking,
wasteful, uncontrolled, hopeless, abused):
The people whose uncontrolled, bloated welfare state gives handouts to hate-
merchants and leaves widows pleading for means-tested dole, claim to be the guard-
ians of justice (Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 7 August 2005).
At other times, the government is represented as trying to ‘do the right thing’
but hampered by rules (such as the Court of Appeal or Human Rights
legislation):
ONE of the world’s most dangerous terror suspects could be back on our streets and
claiming handouts after the Government yesterday lost a battle to kick him out. Evil
cleric Abu Qatada, dubbed Al Qaeda’s ambassador in Europe, won his human rights
appeal against deportation back to Jordan (Daily Express, 10 April 2008).
In this article, about terror suspect Yasser al-Serri, the British government
seem to be represented as being unduly obstructionist:
He is also thought to have helped in the recent murder of the Taliban’s main opponent
in Afghanistan. He draws thousands of pounds in British welfare benefits while the
Government says there is not enough evidence against him (Mail on Sunday,
30 September 2001).
In other articles, it is not the government but local councils that are jointly
targeted along with the ‘scroungers’. For example, in the following article, a
‘scrounger’ who was found guilty of conspiracy to murder is linked to another
story about councils that are responsible for placing children in danger. In
2009 the British media focused on the social services of Haringey Council,
which was seen as indirectly responsible for the death of ‘Baby P’ – a
seventeen-month-old boy who died after suffering more than fifty injuries
from his mother’s boyfriend, despite the fact that the child had been repeat-
edly seen by Haringey’s children’s services and health professionals:
BUNGLING Baby P social services bosses sent a foster child to live with the terrorist
leader behind the airline liquid bomb plot. Muslim fanatic Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28,
was amazingly approved as a carer by Haringey Council, North London, despite
being under police surveillance. Dole-scrounging Ali was approved as a foster carer
despite a poor employment record and being a known Taliban supporter (Daily Star,
12 September 2009).
Articles about ‘Muslim scroungers’ therefore also have a secondary function,
allowing newspapers that do not support the Labour government to portray it
as at best impotent at resolving the problem, at worst enabling it. This helps to
explain why the majority of references to Muslims on benefits occur in right-
leaning newspapers.
reader complaints that are made about columnists, as they are described as
simply giving their personal views or ‘robust opinions’. Thus it could be
argued that the deployment of columnists could be one way in which more
negative constructions of Muslims are legitimated by certain newspapers.
However, using named columnists is not the only legitimation strategy that
newspapers use in order to publish more controversial representations of
Muslims. Another way is to print letters written by members of the public,
which often appear the day after the original article. On 18 January 2005 the
Daily Express published several articles about Omar Bakri, including an
editorial entitled ‘THIS EVIL SCROUNGER MUST BE DEPORTED –
RIGHT NOW’. The following day a letter in the same newspaper said: ‘After
a lifetime working and paying taxes, my wife and I have a joint income less
than half the amount this scrounging parasite receives each week.’ In this
case, the letter simply repeats the sentiment in the original article (with an
additional label – parasite). However, in other cases, letters can represent a
more simplified version of a story. For example, a few months later the Daily
Express published the following:
DAVID Blunkett has ordered a benefits blitz on Islamic hate clerics who sponge off
the state (17 August 2005).
The following day, a member of the public referred to this story in a letter:
SO, David Blunkett is to have a blitz on Muslim clerics who sponge off the state
(‘Benefits blitz on the hate preachers’, August 17) (18 August 2005).
It is interesting here how the original article referred to ‘Islamic hate clerics’,
while the letter writer (or the person who edited the letter) reworded this as
‘Muslim clerics’. This may seem like a small or unimportant alteration, but
it could be argued that it has several effects. First, the replacement of Islamic
(a word that connotes the religion) to Muslim (a word that connotes the person
who practises the religion) serves to personalise the story and potentially
contributes to a negative prosody of the word Muslim. Additionally, the
change from ‘hate clerics’ to ‘clerics’ is a generalising strategy. No longer
is a specific set of ‘hate clerics’ the problem; we are now prompted to think in
terms of just ‘clerics’. To be fair, the term ‘hate preachers’ occurs in the
following line, but here the implication is that terms such as ‘hate preachers’,
‘Islamic hate clerics’ and ‘Muslim clerics’ are all somehow interchangeable
and equivalent. A similar letter in the same newspaper the following month
asks: ‘Now have the clerics scrounging benefits in the UK been thrown out?’
(8 September 2005).
The Daily Star also uses opinions from members of the public, which are
elicited through encouraging readers to send text messages. A selection of
these are then published in a regular column called Text maniacs (a pun on
190 From hate preachers to scroungers: who benefits?
the term ‘sex maniacs’). As with the Daily Express, there is some evidence
that opinions in this column are extending the ideas of a small number of
people, who voice very abhorrent views, to a wider set of people. For
example, on 6 August 6 2005 the Star ran the headline ‘BLAIR: I’LL
THROW OUT THE MUSLIMS WHO PREACH HATE; PM WARNS
FANATICS OF NEW LAWS ON WAY’. Two days later a text maniac
wrote: ‘WELL DONE TONY BLAIR NOW DELIVER THE GOODS
CLERICS PANICKING ALREADY COS NO MORE HANDOUTS’
(8 August 2005). Again, the generalising term clerics is used. On 18 September
2008 another text maniac wrote: ‘The credit crunch could be a blessing in
disguise. All the poles and muslim scroungers will go home if theres no
money left to give out!’ Here, the scroungers are not represented as a small
number of clerics who preach hatred, or even clerics as a class, but as
‘muslim’. It could be argued that letters, and, in particular, text messages,
are effective vehicles for the spread of generalising negative discourses,
because the need for brevity means that they do not encourage nuanced
description or discussion.
for a ride’, the Daily Star made extensive use of inclusive (us, we) and
exclusive (they, you) pronouns to create a division between every Briton
and the ‘four Muslim immigrants’:
[W]e showered houses and benefits on those who made it to our shores, legally or
otherwise. But while we may be a soft touch, we are not so soft in the head as to allow
the claim by four Muslim immigrants that we pay for them to transport their spouses’
bodies back to their home countries for burial. An appeal court judge had to tell them
in legal language what every Briton would have told them in far more basic words:
You must be joking (24 March 2006).
The Star also ran a telephone poll about the story, asking readers to vote
about whether the outcome had been fair. The following day, they reported:
‘A WHOPPING 98% of Daily Star readers say Muslims should not get
handouts to bury their dead overseas’ (25 March 2006). These two stories,
on polygamists and burying the dead, suggest that the ‘scrounger’ discourse
was robust, not simply connected to terrorists or ‘hate preachers’ but part of
an ongoing campaign to represent Muslims negatively.
So far, the majority of quoted articles have been from tabloid newspapers.
This is because it is these papers that published most of the stories and helped
to propagate the idea of Muslims claiming benefits as newsworthy. Although
there is a smaller amount of data to examine in the broadsheets, it is also
worth looking at how they tackle the same subject.
has been hijacked as ruthlessly and comprehensively as any airliner. It is the Guardia-
nistas who have turned London into one of the terrorist capitals of the world, who have
perverted the notion of ‘human rights’ while lining their pockets out of the legal aid
budget… [I]f bin Laden pitched up in Haringey tomorrow there’d be plenty of
apologists and left-wing lawyers queuing up to support his right to live here on benefits
(22 September 2001).
The right-leaning broadsheets use more restrained language than the tab-
loids, and at times paint a complex picture, which simultaneously appears to
be sympathetic towards Muslims in poverty, characterising them as being
vulnerable to being recruited into terrorism, yet at the same time criticising
the Labour government’s welfare policy as actually damaging Muslims rather
than helping them:
The New Labour slums of welfare dependency are more likely to trap British
Muslims (overwhelmingly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin) than any other strata
of British society, including that of British Indians, who are mainly Sikh and Hindu.
Only 10% of Anglo-Indian households are workless, a far healthier figure than the
15% for indigenous whites. But more than 30% of British Muslims of Pakistani
origins are workless; over 30% of working-age Muslims have no qualifications, twice
the national average; and Muslims are least likely to own their own homes of any
British ethnic group. To be workless is an option in Britain, in a way it is not in
America; and the problem of welfare-dependency – a problem made very much
worse by the Labour government – is particularly acute amongst Muslims. Still not
sure what this has to do with the terrorist attacks? Then consider the case, among
others, of Yasin Hassan Omar, the 24-year-old would be suicide bomber (The
Business, 1 August 2005).
According to the Office of National Statistics, 35 per cent of Muslim households have no
adult in employment, more than twice the national average, though no liberal columnist
would dream of ever writing about ’Muslim scroungers’ (15 November 2006).
This is one of only two direct references to Muslim scroungers in the entire
corpus (the other being the ‘Text maniacs’ described above). It is perhaps
odd, then, to single out liberal columnists (as no columnists use the term, even
those in right-leaning tabloids). The Daily Telegraph has used scare quotes
around the term, although one reading of this article is that the hypothetical
situation that is set up and the scare quotes are a way of justifying the
inclusion of a term that otherwise would be unacceptable.
Conclusion
In the process of carrying out the analysis, a number of issues were raised.
One is to do with news values. Clearly, the tabloids and broadsheets have a
very different perspective on whether stories about Muslims who claim
benefits count as ‘news’. This perspective is also subject to each newspaper’s
own political perspective. So, at one extreme is a right-leaning tabloid such as
the Daily Express (634 references), and at the other is a left-leaning broad-
sheet such as The Independent (no references). Depending on one’s own
perspective, it could be argued that the Daily Express over-focuses on such
stories, or that The Independent is ignoring a newsworthy issue completely.
Political perspectives apart, another reason for the varying focus across
different newspapers in the corpus could be linked to the correlation between
the socio-economic profile of broadsheet and tabloid readers (see Figure 3.2)
and the frequency of reporting of Muslims on benefits. Poorer readers may be
a more receptive audience regarding stories about who should or should not
receive government support.