Critical Investigation Notes & Quotes

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2734500/Benefits-Street-2-begins-filming-deprived-crime-hit-area-Stockton-Tees-sparking-anger-MPs-locals.html 

"They don't give a damn as long as it brings in the viewers. They don't care if anyone gets hurt" - Person living on Kingston Road, Stockton.

'We are getting it 24/7 down here. They will edit the truth so it looks like lies and edit the lies so it looks like the truth" - Person living on Kingston Road, Stockton.

'I think it is disgusting it is making it our street look like a hell hole. They are claiming it is a programme which shows everyone in the community helping out but it's not."  - Person living on Kingston Road, Stockton.

'There is no doubt this is about exploiting vulnerable people in order to make money. I know they will say it is about trying to give people a voice, but all they will do is expose them to the full glare of the national media" - Alex Cunningham, Labour MP for Stockton North

"I don't want them here making a programme which will show people in the worst possible light and potentially do such huge damage. For the producers it's easy ratings for a few weeks, but the damage they do can last much longer."  - James Wharton, Tory MP for Stockton South

"The vast majority of people know that the programme plays to negative stereotypes and I'm certain it won't reflect the amazing sense of community we have here in Stockton" - Stockton Council leader Bob Cook

"There are some brilliant people in Stockton and I think the programme tries to show the worst.I used to be a fan of Channel Four before Benefits Street started. It disappoints me." - Eileen Johnson, Labour councillor for Norton South

"When it aired earlier this year Benefits Street attracted widespread controversy, with critics branding it 'poverty porn' and it received 1,800 viewers' complaints. The series was investigated by regulator Ofcom owing to the huge number of complaints"

"It has become Channel 4's most popular programme since the 2012 Paralympics, attracting audiences of more than five million"

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/10/channel-4-stitch-up-benefits-street

"They were very clear and transparent with everyone on the street about what the nature of the programme was, why they were there and what the nature of the end product was." - Ralph Lee, Channel 4 head of factual commissioning

When asked about the programme being branded as "poverty porn" by some critics, Lee said: "I am deeply uncomfortable with the phrase. It's inaccurate and patronising towards people who take part in these programmes and open their lives up. It's quite offensive to the people who make them, and make them with diligence and integrity. It's a phrase I resent quite heavily."

When asked about the social media backlash from the public, Lee said: "I don't think you should judge the programme by the extreme reaction represented by a handful of very intemperate tweets."

"It opens a window on part of our welfare state, our country, and if what we see is shocking, then the question is shouldn't we be changing the system? We are really good in Britain at ignoring extreme poverty and pretending it doesn't happen." - The editor of the Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson

"I don't think this is a freak show, I think it portrays them in quite a positive light. A lot of the characters are ones that I personally warm to. The villain of the piece isn't the people, the villain is the system that makes them lead lives in the way that they do." - The editor of the Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson

"What struck me is that it was called Benefits Street and then three-quarters or more of the programme actually followed one storyline which was about a petty criminal and shoplifter and how he lived on the proceeds of his crime, rather than the reality of what people face when they live on benefits," - Labour MP, Dame Anne Begg, the chairwoman of the Commons work and pensions committee

"Part of the problem of projecting the extreme cases is that people then extrapolate that and say that applies to everybody who is on benefits. There wasn't anybody who was a typical benefit claimant featured on the programme at all. There was a huge imbalance." Labour MP, Dame Anne Begg, the chairwoman of the Commons work and pensions committee

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/11471252.Benefits_Street___39_a_myth__39__says_Teesside_academic/?ref=mr

“The idea of 'benefit ghettos' where unemployment is a 'lifestyle choice' is a powerful one that helps justify the Government's cuts to welfare budgets. Yet our research has demonstrated that this is a myth, in the sense that it does not reflect the facts of the matter.” - Professor Rob MacDonald of Teesside University

“Programmes like Benefits Street are not serious documentaries, despite claims made by the producers to be giving a voice to people who otherwise would not have one. Instead, they are crude and gimmicky entertainment shows out to make a fast buck for television executives, trivialising important issues and perpetuating negative stereotypes by exploiting those people entitled to state support to make ends meet.” - Alex Cunningham, Labour MP for Stockton North

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9116701/britains-dirty-secret/

"We have, as a country, grown used to pretending they don’t exist; we shovel them off to edge-of-town housing estates and pay them to stay there in economic exile. We give them welfare for the foreseeable future, and wish them luck in their drug-addled welfare ghettos. This is our country’s dirty little secret, which has just been exposed by a devastating Channel 4 documentary. And the left are furious."

"The biggest scandal of Benefits Street, which Channel 4 is unlikely to reveal, is that White Dee is behaving rationally in deciding not to work...

Dee is a single mother with two young children.  Were she to earn, say, £90 a week as a cleaner, then the system would reduce her benefits by £70 — an effective tax rate of 78 per cent on that £90 she’s earned. She’d thus be slaving away all week for £20 — far less than the minimum wage"

"If she landed a £23,000-a-year job, her effective tax rate would still be 74 per cent – so she’d end up just £5,975 a year better-off than if she’d spent the year sitting on the sofa watching daytime TV and chatting to her pals on the street. If she then worked extra hours, or earned a pay rise, she’d keep a pitiful 9p in every extra pound paid. This is nothing to do with indolence. Which of us would work at a 91 per cent tax rate?"

"So the tabloid critics are wrong — these people aren’t scroungers, they’re reacting in a way that any of us would in the same situation."

"These 91 per cent tax rates ought to be a national scandal, raised regularly in Parliament. This is why the people of Benefits Street don’t work — and MPs who talk about ‘scroungers’ should ask what they’d do in the same situation. "

"Make a documentary about poverty in Uganda and you could win an award. Look at problems in Britain and you’re reported for thought crime"

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/news/a543116/benefits-street-essential-documentary-or-poverty-porn.html#~oUTlA5LuukaWaa

"Television producers hunt for unsympathetic examples of unemployed people - in this case, on a street in Birmingham; they portray them in the worst possible light; and they fuel the pervasive sense that people on benefits are feckless scroungers," - The Independent's Owen Jones

"Last year's Skint was basically Benefits Street under a different name and the ratings-grabbing Big Fat Gypsy Wedding franchise feels like it is now the blueprint for all C4 docs - laughing and pointing at the vulnerable, under the guise of a serious social and cultural study"

"In this climate I don't think there is a more important job for programme makers than to record what life is like on the receiving end of the latest tranche of benefit cuts. In fact it's not just important, it's essential." - Channel 4's head of documentaries Nick Mirsky

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/12/benefits-street-poverty-porn-british-fury

"British society seems to require a regularly-updated register of sanctioned hate figures, about whom it's OK to say more or less anything; people who form a vital pressure valve for this terrifying pent-up societal wrath"

" I didn't hate anyone in it. I liked them. A lot of what they had to put up with looked absolutely awful, but there also seemed to be far more authentic community spirit than I've seen on TV since Postman Pat's Magic Christmas. How you could come away feeling anything other than affection for most of the people involved is beyond me."

""Benefits Street" is a title cynically chosen to push buttons, and that ploy has worked"

 Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) - Stanley Cohen

A moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as moral entrepreneurs, while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as "folk devils".

Stanley Cohen (1987) defines moral panic as a sudden increase in public perception of the possible ‘threat to societal values and interests’

Amine Zidhou - University of Miami

“Creating consent (hegemony) is never a simple act. It is rather the result of the social structures and the cultural patterns that dictates for each group its behaviour and for each institutions its practices.”

Stuart Hall

"The mass media play a crucial role in defining the problems and issues of public concern. They are the main channels of public discourse in our segregated society"

"When blacks appear in the documentary/current affairs part of broadcasting, they are always attached to some 'immigrant issue': they have to be involved in some crisis or drama to become visible actors to the media."

"There has been little, attempt either in drama, documentary or features to explore and express the rich, complex, diverse and troubled experience of blacks."

Richard Dyer

A stereotype “is not merely a short-cut…it is something more. It is the projection upon the world our own sense of value,” (The Role of Stereotypes, 245).

 “it is nor stereotypes, as an aspect of human thought and representation, that are wrong, but who controls and defines them, what interests they serve,”

“the use of stereotypes, has to be acknowledged as a necessary, indeed inescapable, part of the way societies make sense of themselves, and hence actually make and reproduce themselves,”

By using stereotypes, we are expressing “an agreement about a social group, as if that agreement arose independently of, the stereotype. Yet for the most part it is from the stereotype that we got our ideas about social groups,”

“Stereotypes are highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They (stereotypes) are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defences we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy” (Dyer, 11). 

http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/marxism/marxism11.html


Public Service Broadcasting

http://www.channel4.com/info/corporate/about/channel-4s-remit

Channel 4 remit : (a) demonstrates innovation, experimentation and creativity in the form and content of programmes;

(b) appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society;

(c) makes a significant contribution to meeting the need for the licensed public service channels to include programmes of an educational nature and other programmes of educative value; and

(d) exhibits a distinctive character.

Does channel 4's remit provide content of an 'educational nature' and 'educative value' with the examples of documentaries explored in my investigation? Or do they simply reinforce stereotypes.

The Digital Economy Act 2010 requires Channel 4 to participate in:

• the making of a broad range of relevant media content of high quality that, taken as a whole, appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society;
• the making of high quality films intended to be shown to the general public at the cinema in the United Kingdom;
• the broadcasting and distribution of such content and films;
• the making of relevant media content that consists of news and current affairs;
• the making of relevant media content that appeals to the tastes and interests of older children and young adults;
• the broadcasting or distribution by means of electronic communications networks of feature films that reflect cultural activity in the United Kingdom (including third party films)
• the broadcasting or distribution of relevant media content by means of a range of different types of electronic communications networks.

In addition, Channel 4 must also:

• promote measures intended to secure that people are well informed and motivated to participate in society in a variety of ways;
• support the development of people with creative talent, in particular people involved in the film industry and at the start of their careers;
• support and stimulate well-informed debate on a wide range of issues, including by providing access to information and views from around the world and by challenging established views;
• promote alternative views and new perspectives
• provide access to material that is intended to inspire people to make changes in their lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_service_broadcasting_in_the_United_Kingdom

https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/making-it-easier-for-the-media-and-creative-industries-to-grow-while-protecting-the-interests-of-citizens/supporting-pages/public-service-broadcasting



Recession - context

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/894/1/47_the_equality_impacts_of_the_current_recession.pdf

http://themediaonline.co.za/2012/05/media-agencies-the-impact-of-the-recession/

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704334604575338691913994892

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/18/channel-4-benefits-street_n_6177654.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-entertainment&ir=UK+Entertainment