The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen

3 The News Media: Constructing the Politics of Disgust?

The News Media Constructing the Politics of Disgust? Most Americans say they feel disgusted by the current welfare system—not because of its wastefulness, but because it undercuts the ethical cornerstone of an honest day’s work, according to a nationwide survey released April 24. (Appendix A, 31; emphasis in original) The above epigraph, from one newspaper article in a survey sample of 149 such articles published in 1995–1996, puts the emotion of disgust at the forefront of the welfare reform debate. Although the 431word article concerns the welfare system’s responsibility, it links the emotion of disgust and its purported origin in a failure of welfare recipients to conform with the American political value of hard work to a series of policies having to do with the behavior of welfare mothers. Consider another finding of the survey by Public Agenda: “The public feels strongly that mothers on welfare should also be required to work, with 76 percent of respondents saying it is unfair to allow them to stay at home with their children when mothers who work cannot afford that luxury” (Appendix A, 31; emphasis mine). The refusal to recognize that raising children is work persists in the United States across various economic strata, and not merely with regard to welfare recipients. But the intersection of this gender bias with poverty emboldens many of the one thousand Americans surveyed to enact the politics of disgust to run roughshod over the desires of some welfare recipients to raise their children full-time. Of course, the majority of welfare recipients for a variety of reasons already work or participate in some sort of program designed to produce employment—be it job training or the pursuit of secondary or higher education (Polakow 1994, 11; 3 65 Appendix A, 122). But the perception that they are not doing something valuable in exchange for their benefits illustrates the long path journeyed from widows’ pensions and Aid to Dependent Children in the early twentieth century to the public identity of the “welfare queen” in 1996. In chapter 2, I present a public identity of the “welfare queen” that has emerged over the past century of U.S. welfare politics as the perception of the race, class, and marital status of the welfare target population has changed. In this chapter, I empirically test data to determine the level of visibility of the “welfare queen” public identity. Poring over news coverage of welfare reform in 1995–1996, I ask, does the print media fan the politics of disgust? I have alluded to three interlocking channels through which the public identity of the “welfare queen” is disseminated and perpetuated: political discourse, academic discourse, and media discourse. The foundation for this first of two content analyses is a 149-article data set derived from five newspapers printed and distributed nationally: the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.1 The newspapers were selected for their size (number of pages), circulation (number of readers and frequency of issues), perceived editorial ideology, and geographic diversity.2 I examined the data to determine whether the news media is indeed a dissemination channel for the public identity of the “welfare queen,”3 and to what degree this identity is associated with policy options regarding welfare reform in 1996. An analysis of the race-, class-, and gender-coded discussion lurking within the political culture also produced new findings challenging earlier research focusing solely on the influence of race in welfare politics. In the interest of brevity, I provide one or two representative excerpts to answer each question, as well as descriptive statistics from the quantitative portion of the content analysis.4 Chapters 3 and 4 provide the results of empirical tests of the argument initiated in chapter 2, that the public identity of the “welfare queen” is a coherent construct of the perceived target population of AFDC, a combination of stereotypes and moral judgments organized into two conceptually distinct content areas: hyperfertility and laziness. To determine whether the “welfare queen” public identity plays a role in public discourse , I analyzed the news media data set in search of answers to four questions: 66 | The News Media 1. Is the public identity of the “welfare queen” a coherent construct of stereotypes and moral judgments? In other words, is it more than just a stereotype? Once I examined whether...