Framing homelessness: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of BBC News UK

Media representation is crucial in shaping public perception of social issues such as homelessness. This is particularly the case for those who lack direct contact with the issue, since news coverage can provide the primary means for such people to learn about these matters. Whilst some discourse-based research has looked at the representation of homelessness in partisan news sources, this study offers the first such analysis of bbc news uk  – a non-partisan, and the most widely consumed, news provider in the UK. Drawing on a specialised corpus comprising 358 online news articles published in 2022 and 2023 (totalling 157,854 words), we conducted a keyword-driven framing analysis, closely reading 100 concordances of each keyword obtained by comparing this corpus against the BE21 corpus. Our findings demonstrate that the bbc predominantly foregrounds responses to and experiences of homelessness rather than its causes, mirroring a long-standing trend amongst partisan news media. However, our analysis also identified housing and polycrisis discourses that could help readers to understand the issue from structural perspectives, as well as a ‘nuisance’ discourse that may stigmatise people experiencing homelessness. Notably, political actors in the central/devolved governments are far less salient than local councils and charities in the corpus.