The Impact of Political Stance on UK Newspaper Coverage of Child and Family Social Work

Previous research has shown that news coverage of the social work profession plays an important role in influencing public opinion, and can damage staff morale if negative, affecting recruitment and retention of staff. Relatively little research has been done to ascertain how factors such as political stance of news outlet influence the way social workers are portrayed. The focus of this research is how child and family social workers are portrayed in eight UK national newspapers between 2018 and 2021 and whether the political stance of the newspapers influenced this. All mentions of social workers in 257 articles from eight major UK national newspapers were coded as either positive, negative, or neutral portrayals. Each article was also categorised for the social work topic it was reporting on. Quantitative analysis of the data found that the political stance of the newspaper was associated with the type of social work it reported on and there was a significant difference in the rate of both positive and negative mentions according to political stance, with right-leaning newspapers having a higher rate of negative mentions than left-leaning and left-leaning papers having a higher rate of positive mentions. This is a study of whether UK newspapers differ in their coverage of child and family social work according to their political stance. Positive mentions of social work were more frequent in left-leaning papers and negative mentions more frequent in right-leaning ones. Social work representatives' engagement with the media could help achieve more balanced reporting.