Benefits street is not about balanced reporting to enable the viewer to make an informed judgement on the pros and cons of the welfare benefits system. If that were the case the programme makers would have interviewed benefit claimants who are desperately seeking work and/or have recently been made redundant after many years of employment, allowing them to give their accounts of the misery and despair they face living out of work. I accept that there is a small hardcore of unemployed people who are work-shy, but this Daily Mail style gutter journalism is hardly conducive to stimulating a constructive debate on this thorny issue with a view to finding a solution, as WR6133 rightly points out. Let’s not kid ourselves here - the programme makers had an agenda and knew full well that the content would fan the flames of division which already existed in our communities as a consequence of austerity. And they certainly succeeded in that regard. You don’t need to take my word for it – the statements from local residents/officials in and around James Turner Street on the fallout from the programme, are testimony to the fact. A representative of the local school, Oasis Academy Foundry said, “What form of media makes children scared to go to school? These children feel they are in a circus.”
