Challenging the Myth of Urban Regeneration: Raising the Profile of Problem Gambling with a Media Campaign

This paper is an examination of discourses challenging the myth of ‘gambling’ as a form of urban regeneration in Great Britain. The focus is primarily on the Daily Mail, which has continually waged a successful media campaign to “Kill the Casino Bill” and constructed a powerful public condemnation of gambling as regenerative. From an analysis of 156 gambling articles from January 2004 to December 2010 common and recurring themes emerged to dismiss gambling as a form of regeneration. These were gambling as immoral, criminal and pathological. These helped shaped discourses around which the debate on gambling was framed and structured.