VAD KAN HA ETT STÖRRE NYHETSVÄRDE ÄN FOTBOLLEN?

Executive summary
The media plays a vital part of today’s society and has a self-proclaimed responsibility to report what is seen as important for the citizens. The news media is also the biggest source of information for most of the population. At the same time, the news media also struggles with
information overload, and competition for the public’s attention on a daily basis. Thus, they need to decide what’s newsworthy, and what’s not. While the economic situation in most newsrooms is strained, mostly because of the commercialization in journalism and the news
media, sports journalism has developed into a cornerstone for many news media outlets. With the power to attract and engage many people at the same time, and with livestreams and “payper-views”, sports journalism can attract a lot of advertisers, which can be vital for the news outlet.

The football World Cup is one of, if not the biggest, sporting event in the world, and news media outlets need to make place for news about the event in their papers. With that in mind, we ask ourselves, how do the two biggest newspapers in Sweden handle the information overload, competition for attention, while simultaneously reporting about what’s on the public agenda?

This paper examines how the Swedish printed newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter report on the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar, and the 2018 football World Cup in Russia. With extra focus on the criticism mentioned in the articles, and the frequency of subjects
important for people all over the world, namely, migrant workers, political subjects, discrimination, war and conflicts and human rights issues. This has been done through a quantitative content analysis consisting of 531 articles from both newspapers. The time period
for the data gathering is between 2018-06-14 to 2018-07-15, for the World Cup in Russia, and between 2022-11-20 to 2022-12-18, for the World Cup in Qatar. The theories applied to the study are news values, news selection and negative news.

The main findings of this study is that, first of all, the Swedish news media had a very similar news selection between the two World Cups, but at the same time we saw a big difference between the two World Cups in terms of our identified topics. The findings show us that all
our identified topics appeared much more frequently in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, compared to in the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The same results were shown for how often the host country, the tournament or FIFA, was subject to criticism in the studied news articles.

This concludes that football World Cups could change the way that news selection is made by news outlets, with background in the theory that negative news is the dominant factor for news selection. We also find support for the small number of critical mentions in previous research about sports journalism, where scholars have criticized the sports journalists for not being critical of the powerful figures in the sport they are covering.