‘Homeless’ and the Cost-of-Living Crisis in The Guardian and MailOnline: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis

In this chapter I explore how The Guardian and MailOnline discursively construct homelessness during the first year of the United Kingdom’s ‘cost-of-living crisis’. Employing corpus-assisted critical discourse analytical methods, I demonstrate that The Guardian’s coverage is typically more contextually nuanced, framing homelessness and the rising cost of living as part of a broader set of intersecting crises (a polycrisis of health, climate, politics and economy). Conversely, MailOnline tends to distinguish between a homelessness crisis and a financial crisis, with people experiencing homelessness depicted pejoratively while ‘working families’ facing the rising cost of living and struggling to pay rent are framed more empathetically. I consider the ideological reasons for the different newspaper representations.