Discussions of structural racism has now moved to the forefront of the Swedish society, and many researchers have sought to understand what form it takes, how it is manifested, how it is exploited and challenged. At the core of this debate we find the media, and its logic embedded with mechanisms of simplification and polarization. Media is our key source of knowledge and information, why it also affects our norms, beliefs and preconceptions. Media thus has the power to mediate, amplify or challenge how we conceptualize the world, and subsequently our (unconscious) racist beliefs. To investigate how media content is influenced by underlying colonial or racist assumptions and stereotypes thus becomes a way to investigate our understanding of reality. In accordance with postcolonial thought, structural and symbolic racism is embedded in language and hidden in images, and surface in the form of domination and feminization, and the portrayal of the subaltern ‘Other’ as passive and irrational. This paper thus departs from postcolonial theory and media logic to undercover hidden patterns of structural, symbolic and historically contingent racism in one of Sweden’s most prominent in-depth foreign TV-magazines, namely Korrespondenterna. Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper explores to what extent racist and colonial stereotypes are reproduced and/or challenged in Korrespondenterna’s representation of Sub-Saharan Africa. In line with postcolonial theory it is found that historically contingent racialized stereotypes are prevalent in Korrespondenterna, and that tendencies of portraying Africa and Africans as passive, feminine and irrational are prevailing. It is thus argued that media logic, imbedded with mechanisms of simplification, polarization and intensification, contributes to the use of colonial stereotypes in media, and thus to the mediation of structural and symbolic racism.

About a year ago, Göteborgs-Posten, one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, decided it was unprofitable to continue producing their feature-style weekend magazine, Två Dagar. Standing at a crossroads, not wanting to stop producing the weekend magazine altogether, they decided to outsource. Spoon Publishing AB, a content agency with strong ties to Göteborg, were assigned with taking over the production. Going forward, Spoon has taken over a majority of the responsibility for the conceptual work and actual production, all with the main purpose of reducing cost and increasing efficiency. Normally Spoon does content marketing for a wide range of customers in an equally wide spectra of channels, from print to radio, television and web. The main purpose of this essay has been to investigate and establish whether the journalistic integrity and quality has in fact been maintained despite the weekend magazine being outsourced. We have analyzed selected editions of the magazine, first and foremost in articles under the vignette fashion, using a qualitative method for content analysis, scrutinizing everything from the denotation of single words to the big picture. This specific vignette contains the most frequent contributions by in-house, or at least reappearing, journalists. Perusing the material in Två Dagar, we have come to the conclusion that the magazine has indeed retained its level of quality and still reflects the same core values as before being outsourced.

In this study we have chosen to explore if there is still signs of gender typing in the two news programmes Rapport and Nyheterna. By using a quantitative survey as a method we have investigated if there are any differences between the sexes and their roles. The two main questions where: How does the representation look when it comes to the numbers of women and men? In what extension is the representation gender typed? Due to different theoretical points and former research we have seen that journalistic subject and gender often tends to go hand in hand. When it comes to other participants, such as subjects of interviews, earlier research has shown that experts most often are men. Whereas women often participate as ordinary people, such as mothers or students. Our theoretical point of views is the existing gender system, both in the society and media sphere. We also take departure in the media system and the fact that what we are fed with from the media also is the way we create our conception of the world. In our results we found that that there is a small difference in how many women and men that appears as reporters in these two news programmes. When it comes to interviewed people there is a slightly larger difference. In both cases men have the upper hand. When observing the results regarding gender and journalistic subjects we see that there are still differences in what journalists cover depending on gender. Also when it comes to subjects of interviews, they also tend to depend on gender. After all we can see that the gender system still remains. If not convincingly enough in the over all numbers of women and men participating, we see it in the field in which they appear. Therefore gender typing still appears to be a problem that has not yet been solved.

Authors: Nanna Isaksson and Fredrik Östberg Title: Who is the typical TV-host on Swedish television? Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 57 TV-hosts have a pivotal role in television. They are the link between the content of the show and its viewers. We didn’t find any relevant studies about TV-hosts in Sweden and decided to carry out a study that would tell us more about them as a group. The purpose with this study was to find the answer to the question: Who becomes a TV-host in Sweden today? By looking at the current TV-hosts through the eyes of a viewer we set out to try to construct the preferred Swedish TV-host. We used a quantitative content analysis on all the hosts on Swedish productions that aired during the month of November 2014. We did not include the regular news shows in our study, because we consider the role of a news anchor to be a field of its own and very different to the role of a TV-host. We used three main aspects for our analysis: gender, age and ethnic background that we applied on all the hosts, but we did this from a viewer’s perspective. We asked ourselves the question: How does this person appear to us as viewers? And then we categorized them through our aspects. TV is a visual medium, and whether you like to admit it or not you’re constantly judging TV-hosts and feel the need to voice your opinion on their performance. We used this method because we wanted to get to the core of what a TV-host is. If you analyze them through a viewer’s perspective you see what the people at the channels that appointed them as hosts want you to see. All in all we analyzed 112 TV-hosts. Some of the hosts in our study appeared more than once, because they were hosting more than one show that aired during the duration of our study. What we looked at was not the number of hosts but the number of roles as TV-hosts within the shows that was included in our study. What was important was to see what kind of person featured as a host, not who. We found out a lot. First of all almost half of the roles as host were occupied by people within the age group 40-49 years old. Female hosts were more common than male (53 percent) and only six percent of roles as host were somebody with a non- Scandinavian ethnic background. As we dived deeper into our numbers we looked at different genres. We found out that women are preferred as hosts in shows that were in the field of Society and facts (66 percent) whereas men were preferred in shows that were in the biggest of our genres, the field of Entertainment, leisure and culture. We looked at the hosts that featured during prime-time, which in Sweden occurs between 8pm and 10pm. In the shows that were broadcasted during prime-time male hosts (53 percent) were preferred to female hosts. We were getting closer to answering our main question. Both younger – 29 years or younger (two percent of the total amount of hosts) – and older hosts – 60 years old or older (four percent) – were marginalized in our study. They didn’t feature at all in certain areas. We could however conclude that young hosts tend to do shows that cater to young people and older hosts tend to do the same towards older people. What was the answer to our main question then? We concluded that the preferred Swedish TV-host is a male whose ethnic background is Scandinavian and is between 40-49 years old. This was largely down to the fact that men tended to be hosting the shows that had the highest ratings (the ones that were broadcasted during primetime) and that they occupied the majority of roles as host within Entertainment, leisure and culture – which was the largest genre of our study.

In this study we examine how the image of women, through framing and stereotyping in interviews, is constructed in the Swedish television morning show Gomorron Sverige on International Women’s Day. Our study is based on qualitative method, using the ECA (Ethnographic Content Analysis) model. Our main theoretical assumptions are that media contributes to constructing the images of reality we see in our heads, and that the images of women mediated through television are stereotypes which are displayed in the presenter’s questions and in the respondent’s answers. By defining the problems related to International Women’s Day, showing causal connections, making moral judgments and presenting solutions, television contributes to the viewer’s perception of what is important, why it is important, what is wrong and how to make it right. Based on our theoretical assumptions we have divided our study into three analytical themes: 1. Topics – our framing analysis based study shows that the agenda of Gomorron Sverige is dependent on whether you speak of women as individuals or as part of a collective. When the woman is portrayed as an individual the common topics are success, equality, feminism and gender roles, whilst the agenda focuses on employment issues, equality, violence against women and international questions of women’s rights when the woman is seen as part of a collective. 2. Stereotypes – our conversation analysis based study shows that the presenter’s questions help maintain images of women and portray them in a stereotypical way. We use three labels to categorize different stereotypes used in Gomorron Sverige: the first woman, the woman as an outsider and the woman of reality. 3. Identity – through conversation analysis we were able to show that, even though the women had power, they were reluctant to accept their influence when introduced by the presenter as powerful women. Our conclusions are the following: When speaking of the women’s collective, the woman is not present, but rather spoken of as a third person. When she is framed as an individual, however, she is present in the studio. Women who are successful in male-dominated areas have to distance themselves from their gender in order to fit within the male standard. The gender of the presenter is of great significance when it comes to the image of women mediated on the International Women’s Day. The only shows with a female presenter are those which spend a majority of the air time talking about topics related to International Women’s Day.

Authors: Patrik Jäverbo & Jon Lindhe Title: Greener on the other side Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish In later years the strict laws and policies surrounding cannabis use have been questioned around the world by several influential leaders, among them US president Barack Obama and former UN secretary general Kofi Annan. It has been argued that the “War on Drugs” has done more harm than good and in some American states and a number of European countries the drug have been legalized or decriminalized. Everybody does not agree however, that legalization is the best course of action and in Sweden the emotions have sometimes run high in the discussions taking place in television shows and newspapers. The purpose of this study is to examine the image media portrays of cannabis; based on the theory that mass media is an important influence on the individual and the way in which he or she views the world. To put the result into a context the Swedish media image will be compared with the one in Denmark and Norway. The main goal is to investigate if there is any difference in the way cannabis is portrayed. To accomplice this task we performed a quantitative content analysis and a framing analysis of 354 articles published online in 9 different newspapers, three for each country. The articles where published in March 2013 and March 2014 and the selection was made using the search engine Mediearkivet, and a search string composed of the three most common words for the drug: cannabis, hasch and marijuana. We found that although the frequency of articles about cannabis and the position of cannabis in the news differed between the countries, the overall image were quite consistent. We found four general ways in which cannabis was framed: a crime frame, a danger frame, a legalization frame and a glorification frame. We also saw that cannabis users where described differently depending on their age and position in society and that cannabis was understood in one way in some articles and in a completely different way in other articles. We argue that this makes the overall image of cannabis in Scandinavian newspapers a fragmented one.

Authors: Martin Mederyd Hårdh, Frida Nygren, Daniel Paulsson Title: Under Extreme Pressure Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Method: Quantitative content analysis Pages: 38 Politically motivated extremism is a common topic in the Swedish public debate – and hence in Swedish media. The purpose of our study is to get an idea of how the media relates to the extremist groupings. On a traditional political scale, ranging from left to right, our study focuses on the Swedish extremists who figure on the outskirts of this scale; The ones who denounce the current system and opt for violence to change it. Violence is often an instrument used to get extreme political ideals in the public eye, and is seen as a threat to the Swedish democracy and the public in general. Both sides argue that the Swedish press is tendentious and treat the various extremist groups differently, airing their distrust for the media as a propaganda tool for these groups to establish themselves in the public debate. Our study consists of a quantitative content analysis where we study articles published in print by seven major Swedish newspapers. The selection of articles were gathered by using broad search strings in a database, to identify articles containing wordings related to right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, and political extremism in general. 967 articles published in 2012 and 2013 were picked out. Our results demonstrate that right-wing extremism is the subject of the articles to a larger extent than left-wing extremism, but with some inconsistency. We show what events that trigger the press to write about extremism and who acts in the texts. Our study is somewhat limited by our narrow selection of articles and the fact that we to an extent have relied on personal interpretations. The results are difficult to compare to any kind of prescriptive condition and should rather be seen as a foundation for further research. Altogether, this study cannot claim to give answers to any questions about whether or not the press remains objective in regard to extremism. It can give answers that pose further questions.

Title: En kompis i brevlådan. En kvantitativ studie om flickor och pojkar i Kamratposten under 1993 och 2013 Authors: Malin Magnusson & Malou Tranlöv Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies, Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Gothenburg Term: Spring 2014 Supervisor: Ulrika Hedman Language: Swedish Kamratposten is a Swedish magazine for children aged 8-14. The target audience is both girls and boys. This makes it the only magazine on the Swedish market that aims to reach both sexes within this age group. Our main purpose with this study is to explore how girls and boys are portrayed in Kamratposten in 1993 and 2013. This was done using a quantitative methodology. By comparing articles from 2013 with articles from 1993 we examined changes over time. The main questions in this study are: ● Are there an equal amount of girls and boys in the material? ● Do girls and boys get equal amounts of space in the magazine? ● Are girls and boys to an equal extent portrayed as active versus passive in the texts and images? ● To what extent can you find gender stereotypes in the texts and images? ● Have these issues changed during the 20 year period? Our results are based on a quantitative content analysis. We have used a code chart to analyse our material. 623 units were analysed, 334 from 1993 and 289 from 2013. We have established a theory basis for this paper on research on children and gender, children and media and child psychology. Our results show that there are overall more girls than boys in the researched material, but when it comes to adults they are, during both years researched, more frequently male. We also found that Kamratposten is a quite neutral magazine for children in regards to how it portrays boys and girls, both in the texts and images.

Authors: Malin Andersson & Mattias Åsén Titel: “Det här är ett plagiat” Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 44 (without appendix) Sportbladet is Sweden’s biggest sports newspaper online. Their audience, as for all online newspaper’s audience, has big expectations of a steady flow of news. The economic conditions of journalism, together with the interests from the owners, may force newspapers to produce large quantities of news for cheap costs. One way to achieve this is to take other media’s news and write them in your own words, so-called “rewrites”. The purpose of this study is to investigate how Sportbladet relates to copyright laws when they rewrite articles online. To answer this question we begin with a quantitative content analysis and continue with a qualitative text analysis. Our quantitative results show that 34% of all articles in a week were rewrites. We found that most articles use three or four “stolen” quotes, but that 29 of 115 articles use more than five stolen quotes. We also found that 18% of the articles use a stolen quote in the heading, subheading and the lead. Furthermore did our qualitative results show us that it is highly likely that some of Sportbladet’s articles are breaking the copyright law. We’ve had the copyright law and previous convicted cases as a base for our analyses and have seen that all of our three examples have a lot of similarities to the previous convicted case we have compared to. Two out of three examples also show to lack an own contribution to the text. They have almost identical disposition to the original text and they use some words from the original text in a way that could be nothing else but imitation. To have a law that few care about and that do not have consequences must be considered a problem. The question is what the reason behind this behavior is? And why is no one being convicted? What will the future bring? In this essay, we discuss this according to theories about economy, digitalization and commercialization. To our help, we have an interview with Aftonbladet’s publisher Jan Helin and a discussion in a podcast episode with Jan Helin and Expressen’s editor in chief Thomas Mattsson.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediatization of Swedish politics on a municipal level. We live in a world were media affects many aspects of life. One of those aspects is the communication between the citizens and the politicians. Our main research questions are: To what extent do politicians communicate with journalists and who initiates these contacts? Do politicians talk to some types of media rather than others? What factors make a politician choose to speak to media? To what extent do leading Swedish municipal politicians use media strategies? To answer these questions we have used various theories to help us understand media’s role of today. First we explain the transformation that has taken part in Swedish media over the last century, from political party press to independent media companies. Then we explain the theories about the mediatization of the politics and the difference between media logic and political logic. Lastly we also go through media’s role in a democratic society. To answer our research questions we constructed an online survey which we sent to all chairmen and vice chairmen of the municipal boards in Sweden, a total of 786 politicians. 525, 68 percent, chose to take the survey. Our study shows that a vast majority of leading Swedish municipal politicians talk to journalists at least once a week. A majority of the politicians also experience that the coverage of their politics differ between different media sources and many also find it hard to reach out to the citizens with their politics through media. Nearly half of the respondents work with media strategies. The study confirms previous studies that the politics are mediatization and that the media affects the politicians’ work to a considerable extent.