“Och så, mer politik”

Abstract
Title: “Och så, mer politik”
Authors: Hannah Zemack and Hannah Andersson
Level: Bachelor thesis in Journalism
Term: HT 2022
Supervisor: Marina Ghersetti

The aim of our study is to examine to what extent the media reports about the politicalmatters and how this reporting looks during the swedish election 2022. Specifically how the news programs Rapport and TV4Nyheterna reported during a Swedish election. Through a
quantitative study of the tb programs we investigate this matter with a basis of three questions as a foundation for further review: 1. Which political matter does TV4Nyheterna respectively Rapport report most about during the last month of the election campaign? And how are these presented? 2. Do reporting priorities change over time? 3. Do Rapport and TV4Nyheterna report on what is most important to the audience?

In order to have theories to base our study on, and to have something to use to explain our findings in the analysis. The two theories that build our theoretical framework are news evaluation and framing theory.

To fulfill the aim of this study we, with the help of a quantitative analysis, studied the different news programs. Before we started the study we wrote a codebook that the data retrieval was based on. We chose two of Sweden’s biggest news programs, Rapport and
TV4Nyheterna. The period we chose to study was between 10th of august to 10th of september. This is because the Swedish election takes place on the 11th of september.

The result of this study shows that the chosen news programs are mostly not reporting about what the public deems as important. When we refer to the public opinion we refer to the Novus opinion survey that takes place before the election. Rapport reported most about
energy policies and TV4Nyheterna reported most about scandals. However can we see that these were the most reported because of events that were important to include in the program. Novus concludes that the most important political matter during this election was healthcare. Together Rapport and TV4Nyheterna only reported in 7 of the 275 features we collected as data. We could also see that the number of features increased during the second half of the month we studied, in other words did they increase the features closer to the election. Our conclusion is therefore that the media does not report about what the public deems as most important. However this does not mean that the media is in the wrong.

Keywords: News evaluation, framing theory, news broadcasts, election monitoring, psephology, politics, public opinion, quantitative content analysis.
Nyckelord: Nyhetsvärdering, gestaltningsteorin, nyhetssändningar, valbevakning, valforskning, politik, publikens opinion, kvantitativ innehållsanalys.