The Media and the Politics of Interpreting Unemployment

Abstract

Are the unemployed protesting less during the 1980s slump because they are more fragmented, isolated and apathetic than they were in the 1930s? Are they doing less because they know so little about their shared plight? Similarly, can the lack of political concern for the unemployed be explained by ignorance, and a failure of empathy based on inadequate information? Are citizens becoming less altruistic, and politicians less anxious about unemployment, at least in part, because they are uninformed about the real condition of the unemployed – whose experience is becoming increasingly remote from everyone else’s?