On September 2 2015 a three-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi was found dead on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey. Alan Kurdi is one of thousands refugees who have drowned while taking the dangerous boat ride over the Mediterranean Sea to escape terror and war in Syria. The shocking picture of his body became the starting point of massive media coverage of the refugee situation in Europe today. According to UNHCR, over 50 million people in the world are refugees today and about 900.000 of them have arrived in Europe by the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. In this Bachelor thesis we are examining the Swedish media portrayal of the refugee situation in Europe. By using a quantitative method and applying theories of newsworthiness and social identity, we have studied 490 articles from September 2015 in Sweden’s four largest newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Expressen. Our aim is to find out how the refugee is portrayed by looking at each person’s gender, age, name, title and position in the article. We want to find out if there is any stereotypical way of presenting the refugees. Furthermore, we want to know if the refugees get to define their own situation or if there are other actors such as politicians, organizations or journalists speaking above their head. Our results show that the newspapers are providing a rather chaotic picture of the refugee situation. Words such as catastrophe, crisis and stream are frequently used to reinforce the impression of turmoil. Forceful words like these can create negative associations amongst the readers and has the potential to influence their opinion about refugees. Refugees get to speak in approximately 60 percent of the articles, but they are rarely the most cited actor. Politicians and columnist are often speaking above their heads. Moreover, we have found a significant difference in the portrayal of men and women. Men are overrepresented in all of the categories in our study. This can partly be explained by the fact that there are more men than women amongst the refugees (according to UNHCR). Nevertheless, the female refugees that do occur in the articles are less likely to be presented with a professional title and less often occurs as the main actor.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the Swedish media publishes personal records in their coverage of three infamous murder cases in Sweden in 2015: the murder of Lisa Holm, the murders at Ikea in Västerås and the school attack in Trollhättan. The study also seeks to compare differences between alternative right wing media’s and mainstream media’s coverage of the cases. The results of the study will be compared to the Swedish rules of press ethics. The method in use will be content analysis, and the material will consist of articles in the Swedish daily newspapers Aftonbladet and Expressen, together with the right wing alternative news sites Avpixlat and Fria Tider. Articles that are published within the first month of the events. The main results showed that there are big differences between how the alternative and the mainstream media publishes personal records. The alternative media has for example published the name of the suspects in all three cases. They also have a bigger focus on ethnicity when writing about both suspects and victims. The alternative media have also broken more of the Swedish rules of press ethics, although the traditional media also has broken quite a few.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether Swedish foreign aid and diplomatic policies has any effect on the selection of foreign news in Swedish news media. We set out to study news concerning countries that experienced a change in their relation to the former Swedish government, which was in rule between 2006 and 2014. The countries we chose for this was Nicaragua, Laos and Senegal, where the Swedish embassies were closed in this period. For Nicaragua and Laos the aid was also reduced. Further, Bolivia, Cambodia and Mali were chosen since the Swedish government opened embassies there, as well as strengthening existing aid programs. Our theoretical points of departure have mainly been a set of different studies on news values; the science of what events becomes news. We have included both the broader theories concerning foreign journalism in general and more specifically those concerning the relationship between foreign journalism and foreign policies. We had two research questions: Has there been any change in the amount of news material from reaching us from these countries since the changes in Swedish representation took place? Has there been any change in the kind of information that reaches us from these countries? Our study was conducted as a quantitative content analysis in which we have studied the amount and nature of news material from our countries of choice in Swedish news media, before and after the changes in Swedish relations towards these countries took place. The results of the study shows that changes in Swedish relations did not seem to affect the presence of those countries in Swedish news media, nor how they were represented in the major Swedish newspapers. No clear patterns were found except that of the general decrease of news from the countries we chose for our study.Our conclusion was that any further studies on this subject would need to encompass a much greater amount of material and a greater knowledge of the editorial circumstances of each news media-object.

The purpose of our study was to research people’s media habits when it comes to news consumption through social media, Facebook in particular, and to try to ascertain if our theory that people today are lacking in source criticism skills has any basis in reality. Our theory is that social media users who rely solely or primarily on Facebook for news consumption are less likely to compare media coverage between outlets and channels, and validate sources, than consumers of traditional media. Broken down into component parts, the main questions we were looking to answer were: • To what extent does our population rely on Facebook as a primary or sole source for news and media coverage? • In what manner does relying primarily or solely on Facebook for news content influence criticism of sources and user acceptance of news content posted directly to their curated feeds? The method we chose was a quantitative study, as we believed that it was more important to begin with finding the frequency of these phenomena before studying the subject on a deeper level. This was done through an online survey that we had intended to send to certain groups of Swedes within the age range of 18-36, but due to being unable to find a way to reach this population we were forced to lessen our scope, and ended up with a highly limited group of respondents that led to a total of only 122 replies. As a result, our conclusions are only relevant for Swedish students of media, journalism and communication sciences. But within that subset, we did not find any conclusive evidence that the theories that we based our study on are grounded in reality. Also, due to the training and expertise of our population, it is not unlikely that they have a more critical approach to news, especially unsourced reports on social media sites. It also seems prudent to assume that they spend more time consuming news than the average person. In conclusion, it would seem that students of these sciences have a very balanced and self-aware approach to source control and criticism in social media environments, applying the same or even stricter guidelines. We also believe that our theoretical framework is sound and that the groundwork that we have done is solid, and as such present this thesis in part as a proof of concept with components that would be suited to be used for larger studies within the field in the future.

Titel: Herr Sport gräver inte – en kvantitativ innehå#sanalys av sportmagasinet Sportspegeln Författare: Jesper Åhlander Kurs: Journalistikgranskning, Instutitionen för journalistik, medier och kommunikation (JMG), Göteborgs universitet Handledare: Marie Grusell Syfte: Att kartlägga innehållet i Sportspegeln 2014, med fokus på innehåll med ett kritiskt förhållningssätt till sportvärlden. Metod: Kvantitativ innehållsanalys Material: Analysen baseras på ett totalurval under 2014 och omfattar 51 avsnitt av sportmagasinet Sportspegeln Huvudresultat: Studien visar att fem procent av innehållet i Sportspegeln under 2014 är sådant som behandlar sportvärldens negativa inverkan på individen och/eller samhället. Den största delen av det totala innehållet i Sportspegeln 2014 handlar om herridrott och den absolut vanligast förekommande sporten är fotboll. Det är sällan innehållet fokuserar på något annat än det idrottsliga utövandet. Innehållet berör oftast idrottare verksamma på internationell nivå, med undantag för de högsta svenska ligorna i fotboll och ishockey. Innehållet har stark elitcentrering, främst på svenska sportstjärnor. Stora idrottshändelser tar mycket av utrymmet i Sportspegeln. En procent av innehållet handlar om handikappidrott.

Bachelor’s Thesis in Journalism Title: One Hundred Years of Swedishness. A Study of Vidi, Den Svenske Nationalsocialisten, Nydemokraten and SD-kuriren Authors: Nils Gruvebäck and Rebecca Lundberg Academic term and year: Spring term 2015 Department: Journalism, Media and Communication Supervisor: Tomas Andersson Odén Examiner: Mathias A. Färdigh During the last two decades nationalist movements have mobilized throughout Europe. In Sweden the growing party is called the Sweden Democrats. During these years they have been accused of having a racist agenda, but since 2005 when Jimmy Åkesson became leader of the party, they have changed their logotype from a burning torch to a blue and yellow hepatica, their popularity has grown and they have tried to dissociate themselves from their rightwing past. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how nationalist movements in Sweden have developed during the last one hundred years. By starting with Vidi, an antisemitic newspaper from 1914, moving through the 1930’s and the Nazi party National Socialist Worker’s Party, to 1994 and the populist party New Democrats and the Sweden Democrats 2014 we want to see how these parties differ from one another – and what they have in common. By using the ECA-method (Ethnographic Content Analysis) we are exploring how swedishness is portrayed and constructed in four nationalist magazines associated to these movements: Vidi, Den Svenske Nationalsocialisten, Nydemokraten and SD-kuriren. Through a postcolonial perspective we investigate how the idea of Swedishness changes throughout the years, in relation to how the idea of the other changes. We see how the idea of Swedishness is created by how the other is portrayed, and how the two are in one way symbiotic and get meaning from one another. We also examine how media is portrayed in these magazines. In a Swedish nationalist discourse it is not unusual to accuse media for censorship, lies and “Swedish hostility”. As this study will show, the idea of Swedish hostility was vital already in 1914.

Swedish sports journalism are often criticized of giving too much attention to teams from big cities in general, and particularly to teams from Stockholm. It´s also a given in sports journalism that a good performance, like a victory in an import game, should result in some media attention. But what happens when these two criteria is opposed against each other? What is most important according to Swedish sports writers; the team from the big city or the winning team? We made a quantitative content analysis on the last ten seasons, 2005 – 2014, of the top Swedish football league, Allsvenskan. But our interest was not to examine every match; our analysis is based on every match where the big city team has lost to a smaller team. During these ten seasons 241 games were played where a smaller team wins against a big city team. We have studied Aftonbladets main article from all these games and, with help from certain theoretical tools, been deciding which team has got the main role in the article. We have been studying the headlines of the articles and which team that it is mainly referring to. Adding to this we’ve also been studying who is quoted in the entrance of the article. We have been analyzing the article picture to decide which team has the main role in it. We have also decided if the article is about one specific person or about the team. By comparing our results with older studies we can say that Aftonbladet gives losing big city teams much more attention than other losing teams. Almost more than half of the headlines focuses on the losing big city team. That number should be put in comparison to older studies saying that Aftonbladet focuses on the winning team in 79 per cent of the main articles. It seems that Aftonbladet thinks it´s at least as important to be a big city club as it is to win the game. We can also show that it´s more common that an article has a one-person-angle when it´s focused on the winning smaller team. It seems that a smaller team depends more on having big name players in their squad to get attention than big city teams have. Being located close to Aftonbladets office in Stockholm is a factor that seems to be important if you are a smaller team and wants attention. The teams that have the toughest time to get attention are located far from Stockholm. They have quite the same results during the last ten seasons as many teams closer to Stockholm but doesn´t get close to the same amount of attention. We can also show that a team that has been successful over a certain amount of time has a better chance of getting media attention, regardless where in Sweden they are located. It seems though that the smaller team has to have been successful in the later years. It doesn´t seem to be enough to have won the league two times in the last 20 years to get attention.

In this study we have looked at medias portrayal of Margot Wallström with the ambition to explore how female polititicans are portrayed in Swedish media. We have done this by a critical discourse analysis on articles from the two biggest daily- and evening papers in Sweden, with a total of 16 articles. We have stood upon the theoretical foundation consisting of gender research, media effects research and discourse research. The gender research has given us explanations and manifestations of the difference between the media portrayal of men and women. The research on media effects has been our way to firmly establish the relevance of our study in a societal perspective. And lastly, the research on discourses has given us the understanding and the tools to go through with our study. To ascertain how gender is portrayed, in the portrayal of Margot Wallström in Swedish media, we developed three analytic themes to apply on our material. Those themes are The Mans Favorite, which focuses on Margot Wallströms private and professional relationships, The Female Self-Thinker, which focuses on her role as a politician, and Politician and Mother, which focuses on her role as a mother. We found that Margot Wallström through her career as a politician has travelled from the role as a mother to the role of a politician. Her family and the matters of her private life has been all over the Swedish press over the years, and her personality has been a big part of the description of her as a politician. Although she is not explicitly mentiones as a female politician more than a few times, she is indeed seen as a woman in politics.

This study examines how the Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet report about hiv and aids. We start our analysis in the summer of 1987 when the famous designer Sigshten Herrgård reveals that he is hiv-infected, which causes a massive press coverage. To see how the reporting changes over time we compare the articles from that summer with how the epidemic was covered by the press in 1997 and 2007. Totally we have studied 355 articles. We chose the theme partly because of Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar (2012), a Swedish tv-serie about the lives and deaths of young homosexuals in Stockholm in the 80’s. It is based on a book serie written by the author and playwright Jonas Gardell who is critical to how media covered hiv and aids when it first came to Sweden. According to him the reporting was alarming and he refers to an article that described hiv as a punishment for people with an immoral lifestyle – homosexuals, prostitutes and drug addicts. We wanted to see if this really was what the reporting was like in the 80’s and what have changed since then. Our results shows that Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet often mention homosexuals, drug addicts and prostitutes in the reporting about hiv and aids. It is most common in 1987 but risky groups can be found in some of the articles from 1997 and 2007 as well. We can also see that the hiv-infected people very seldom get to express their view about the issue, instead it is experts, organizations and authorities that are the main actors as subjects in the reporting. We can determine that journalists often use words with a negative value in the articles about hiv and aids, such as promiscuous, non-human and reckless attitude. There has been an increasing amount of people getting hiv in Sweden, while the amount of articles in Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet have decreased.