What the Press Reveals About "The Unemployed": A Lexicometric Analysis of 12,996 Articles from French Written Newspapers from 2005 to 2022

Unemployed people carry a stigma that leads to negative consequences. Little is known about this stigma's origins, content, evolution, and transmission channels. Combining insights from social psychology and communication studies, we used lexicometric methods to analyze 12,996 articles on "the unemployed" published in the French written press between 2005 and 2022. We found that unemployed people were largely invisible in the media, that they were mostly represented as dehumanizing accounting, political, or welfare program issues rather than as individuals, and that unemployment was mostly framed as an individual concern. When they were visible, which was rare, they were mostly portrayed as perseverant and willing poor men with a strong social norm to work, who took personal responsibility for their situation, saw their unemployment and job search as an individual concern, and tried to find a job by doing (almost) anything possible. In addition, we showed that frames about unemployed people could emerge from both political party leaders in a top-down approach and from mostly liberal and local newspapers in an opposing bottom-up view that reports on the lives of unemployed people. Our findings contribute to the understanding of unemployment stigma and offer opportunities for further research on its consequences.