Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe

“As the wealth gap increases to grotesque proportions and more and more people plunge into economic desperation around the world, this timely collection rightly returns the spotlight to class relations in Europe three decades after the end of socialism had dimmed it. It offers an eye-opening tour of how shame has been mobilized in a range of European media to stigmatize the poor and legitimize the very world order that runs on creating poverty.” —Aniko Imre, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, USA

“Poverty is frst and foremost about being deprived of essential material resources. But it is also cultural: about being excluded from many of society’s demands and being blamed for your own impoverishment. The media play a major part in con- structing the demonology and in popularising the imagery of blaming the victim that exacerbate poverty, and this book gathers chilling evidence of the various forms this takes in differing European countries. An essential and troubling read.” —Peter Golding, Northumbria University, UK Irena Reifová • Martin Hájek Editors Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe Editors Irena Reifová Martin Hájek Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences Department of Media Studies Department of Sociology Institute of Communication Studies Institute of Sociological Studies and Journalism Charles University Charles University Prague, Czech Republic Prague, Czech Republic

ISBN 978-3-030-73542-5 ISBN 978-3-030-73543-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73543-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

This edited volume could not materialise without energy, helpfulness and brainpower of many colleagues and friends. Editors wish to thank all their colleagues in the project ‘Poverty as Media Spectacle: Shaming Low-Income People on Reality Television and Internet’ (GACŘ 17-02521S) for their indefatigable engagement. Thanks go to Markéta Broumová, Jakub Machek and Radim Hladík, as well as to the international collaborators Sabina Mihelj, Anja Hirdman and Alexander Dhoest. Editors are further grateful to the colleagues Karel Čada, Ondřej Špaček, Jiří Šafr and Dan Prokop for helping to refine the arguments in fruitful discussions. Students in Media Studies and Sociology at Faculty of Social Sciences—Veronika Šlejharová, Zuzana Karasčáková, Kristýna Jiroutová, Dan Frantál and Kateřina Simbartlová—were of great help in collecting the research data and Aidan Akira Moos pro- vided invaluable help with the language and style. They all deserve our thanks. We are thankful to the Czech Science Foundation GAČR without whose support this project would not be possible. In Palgrave we would like to thank Malla Sanghera-Warren for her encouragement at the MeCCSA conference in Sterling, Milly Davies for guiding us through the next steps and Liam McLean and Jack Heeney for their technical support.

v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Irena wishes to thank her best friend Alena for being the best best friend ever, always and under any circumstances. She is also thankful to her friends Markéta, Tereza, Veronika, Tereza, Lenka, Zuzana and Kamila for their warmth and support, and to her cat Molly Hooper for being a jolly, fuffy companion.

Prague, 16 November 2020 About the Book

The key concepts of the book are media, class, poverty and shaming. The contributors to this book examine how certain social relations and their cultural meanings in the media, namely class and poverty, are transformed into factual or moral attributes of people and situations. Class and poverty are not understood as certain things and actions, or concepts and num- bers; both class and poverty are assumed to be, above all, particular social relationships or a set of relations between people, things and symbols. Without denying that contempt for the destitute Other is an affect found throughout history and in various socioeconomic contexts, the chapters in this book—through their concern with the mediated gaze on class—narrate predominantly the challenges brought about by the media’s spectacular take on poverty and low status as they (at least) coincide with the neoliberal era. This volume will be of essential reading for the scholars specialising in the study of media and social inequalities from the vantage points of Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology or European Studies.

vii Contents

1 Perspectives on Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty in European Contexts 1 Irena Reifová and Martin Hájek

2 ‘Benefts Scroungers’ and Stigma: Exploring the Abject-Grotesque in British Poverty Porn Programming 19 Louise Cope

3 Neural Attunement to Others: Shame, Social Status, and Rewarded Viewing in Reality Television in Sweden 41 Anja Hirdman

4 Shame, (Dis)empowerment and Resistance in Diasporic Media: Romanian Transnational Migrants’ Reclassifcation Struggles 61 Irina Diana Madroane

5 Mediating Class in a Classless Society? Media and Social Inequalities in Socialist Eastern Europe 85 Sabina Mihelj

6 Invisibility or Inevitability: Performing Poverty in Czech Reality Television 105 Martin Hájek and Daniel Frantál

ix x Contents

7 Shaming Working-Class People on Reality Television: Perspectives from Swedish Television Production 125 Peter Jakobsson and Fredrik Stiernstedt

8 Disparaging ‘the Assisted’: Shaming and Blaming Social Welfare Recipients in Romania and Hungary 143 Hanna Orsolya Vincze, Andreea Alina Mogos, and Radu Mihai Meza

9 Othering Without Blaming: Representing Poverty in Flemish Factual Entertainment 163 Alexander Dhoest, Marleen te Walvaart, and Koen Panis

10 Inter- and Intranational Mediated Shaming to Justify Austerity Measures: The Case of the ‘Greek Crisis’ 183 Yiannis Mylonas

11 Social Distances Through Scopic Practices: How Czech Reality Television Audiences Negotiate Social Inequalities 201 Irena Reifová

12 Everybody Is a Fool: Rural Life, Social Order and Carnivalesque Marginalisation in a Hungarian Television Series 223 Balázs Varga

Index 243 Notes on Contributors

Louise Cope is a post-doctoral researcher and associate lecturer at Sheffeld Hallam University. Her primary research interest is investigating how performances and portrayals of social class are symbolically linked to expressions of disgust and stigma, and the implications of this on social inequalities. In particular, there is a focus on how social class and gender are enacted in reality television, documentary and social media, as well as a consideration of how neoliberal ideology is reinforced in these textual spheres. Her doctoral research employs an original abject-grotesque framework to analyse contemporary confgurations of the British under- class—‘benefts scroungers’—in poverty porn programming. Other recent work includes a chapter exploring performance and authenticity of the self within a crossover of reality television environments, published in the edited collection Exploring Television Acting (2018). Alexander Dhoest is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and Chair of the Media, Policy and Culture research group. His research focuses on the multiple connections between media, in particular television, and issues of social identity, including national, sexual and ethnic identity, combining research on media production, representation and reception. He has published widely on these issues in edited books and journals such as European Journal of Cultural Studies and Critical Studies in Television. Daniel Frantál is a Master’s student of Sociology at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague. He is doing research on freetekno practices of authenticity.

xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Hájek is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague. His main research interests are normative orders of society, symbolic interactionism, discourse and narrative analysis. He is the author of a monograph on various types of textual analysis in social sciences and his works have been published widely in peer-reviewed journals. (orcid.org/0000-0001-9213-6404) Anja Hirdman is Professor of Media and Communication at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. Her research interest addresses the relationship between mind, body and media engagement in screen and digital cultures as well as questions of representation, affect and visuality. She has published in a variety of journals such as European Journal of Cultural Studies, MediaKultur, Journal of Media and Communication and Celebrity Studies. Her latest book is Emotional Spaces (2018). Her most recent work concerns digital sociality, group dynamics and affective contagion on social media sites. Peter Jakobsson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University. His recent publications include a study of the Swedish feld of television production, published in the journal Poetics, and a study of the formation of the Swedish feld of Media and communications research, published in the Nordic Journal of Media Studies. He is also the co-editor of a special issue on Class and/in the Media, in Nordicom Review.

Irina Diana Mădroane is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies at the West University of Timișoara (Romania). She holds a PhD in Philology (West University of Timișoara) and a MA in Sociology (Lancaster University). Her main specialisations are critical discourse analysis and the study of media discourse, and she has done extensive research on the construction of migrant identities and migration as a public problem. She is the author of Romanians in the Right-Wing British Press: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach (2014) and of numerous studies published in peer-reviewed, national and international journals and volumes. She has co-edited a special issue on ‘Discourse in Transnational Social Fields’ in Critical Discourse Studies (2017) and a volume, Debating Migration as a Public Problem: National Publics and Transnational Fields (2018), together with C. Beciu, M. Ciocea and A.I. Cârlan. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Radu Mihai Meza is Associate Professor of Digital Media and Journalism at Babeș–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. With a background in both journalism and computer science, he holds a PhD in Sociology from Babeș-Bolyai University with a thesis on the structure and dynamics of popular social networking systems. His research focuses on digital media and online popular culture, media and information literacy, computational methods, digital social science and machine learning applications in the study of computer mediated communication. In 2018–2020, he was grant director of a national research project ‘Analyzing Dangerous Speech, Hate Speech and Offensive Speech in Romanian and Hungarian Public Facebook Contexts Using Computational Sociology Approaches’ and senior researcher in another national research project ‘The Domestication of Foreign News in East-Central Europe’. Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University. She is the author of Media Nations: Communicating Belonging and Exclusion in the Modern World (2011), Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective: Politics, Economy, Culture (2012, with J. Downey) and From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding State Socialist Television (2018, with S. Huxtable). She published widely on mass communication and cultural identity, comparative media research and Cold War media and culture. Her most recent project, conducted with Václav Štetka,̌ examines the role of the media in the rise of illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe (ESRC, 2019–2021).

Andreea Alina Mogos ̧ is Associate Professor of Journalism and Digital Media at Babes–Bolyai̦ University, Cluj-Napoca. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Babes-Bolyai̦ University and a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences from Université Paris 8—Vincennes Saint-Denis with a thesis on the media representations of the Romanians in the French daily newspapers. She obtained her Habilitation in 2016, with the thesis “Traditional and new media representations”. Her research focuses on media representations and frames, visual analysis methodologies, media genres and their transformation. Yiannis Mylonas is Associate Professor of Media Sociology and Cultural Studies at the School of Media of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on issues related to discourse and frame analysis of news xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS media representations of war and economic crisis, emphasising media con- structions of ‘otherness’. He has also published studies on historical memory and social media, the political economy of copyrights, civic cultures and political subjectivity, among others. He is the author of The ‘Greek Crisis’ in Europe: Race, Class and Politics (2019). Koen Panis is Guest Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp and Lecturer in Media and Communication at the Thomas More University of Applied Sciences (Belgium). His research focuses on media and popular culture, with particular interest in celebrity studies and television studies, focusing on representation as well as audi- ence reception. Irena Reifová is an assistant professor at the Department of Media Studies, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. Her research and teaching interests are in cultural studies, theory of popular culture, television studies and post-socialist mediated memory. She has previously published in the European Journal of Communication and other international peer-reviewed journals as well in books by Routledge, Manchester University Press, I.B. Tauris and others. Since 2016 she has been working as ECREA General Secretary. Fredrik Stiernstedt is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. His areas of research concern media and social class, media work and labour, the political economy of the media and questions of media trust. His recent publications are in journals such as New Media & Society, Media, Culture and Society, European Journal of Communication and Poetics. Marleen te Walvaart holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Antwerp. This research focuses on television production processes and the engagement of audiences in a digitising media context from the perspectives of producers. She now works as a policy and strategic advisor at the Dutch public service media organisation NPO. Balázs Varga is Associate Professor of Film Studies at ELTE, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He writes and lectures on modern and contemporary Hungarian cinema, contemporary European cinema, production studies, popular cinemas and documentaries. He is the founding editor of Metropolis, a scholarly journal on flm theory and history based in NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Budapest. His recent research project examined the post-communist tran- sition of the Hungarian flm industry. His current project focuses on popular Hungarian screen cultures during and after the decades of socialism. He has published several articles and essays in English, Italian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian books and journals. His recent book in Hungarian Filmrendszerváltások. A magyar játékflm intézményeinek átalakulása 1990–2010 [Film Regime Changes. Transformations in Hungarian Film Industry 1990–2010] is brought out by L’Harmattan Publishers, Budapest. Hanna Orsolya Vincze is Associate Professor of Communications at Babeș–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She holds a PhD in History from Central European University, Budapest, and was a recipient of the Chevening scholarship at the University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on the uses of sociopolitical concepts and languages, and she has pursued these interests on both historic and contemporary discourses, including news media and social media. In 2018–2020 she was the princi- pal investigator of a research project ‘The Domestication of Foreign News in East-Central Europe’ and senior researcher in a national research project ‘Analyzing Dangerous Speech, Hate Speech and Offensive Speech in Romanian and Hungarian Public Facebook Contexts Using Computational Sociology Approaches’. List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Julie undergoes biliary drainage procedure 33 Fig. 3.1 The emotional climax in Lyxfällan 48 Fig. 6.1 Zlatá mládež members (the left half) participate in the ghetto’s work activities, carrying metal waste to sell at a waste collection point. They all have fun but in different contexts: The poor youth have fun seeing white, rich fellows enjoying their work; the rich youth enjoy it because they can perform low-status work even with humour. (CT) 112 Fig. 6.2 Participants of Mise nový domov in their newly reconstructed living room. The woman is the host of the show. The expected interpretation of the scene from a dominant hegemonic position is a dream come true—with such a home they are not poor anymore. (TV Nova) 116 Fig. 8.1 Co-occurrence network for the comments in Hungarian (Nhu2 = 3050) 148 Fig. 8.2 Co-occurrence network for the comments in Romanian (Nro2 = 2253) 149 Fig. 8.3 PSD voters on their way to the support rally. (Recorder.ro) 152 Fig. 9.1 A respectful portrayal of Leona in Een kwestie van geluk. (VRT/Panenka) 171 Fig. 11.1 The family with two kids living in a residential hotel in S7E10 of Výmena manželek. (TV Nova) 209

xvii List of Tables

Table 6.1 The sample of Reality Television programmes analysed in this study 110 Table 7.1 The relations between the three main concepts: habitus, mental schemas and genre interpretations 130 Table 9.1 Underlying explanatory models of poverty (Vranken, 2009) 165 Table 11.1 Overview of respondents and their sociodemographic characteristics 208

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