This bachelor thesis is a comparative study of the Norwegian and Swedish labour pressafter the second world war. The Norwegian labour press has been more successful than the Swedish in the postwarperiod, and the aim of the study is to discover what the key reasons for this development are. The variables of interest in the thesis are mainly statistics regarding election results, partymembership and union membership, the overall situation for competition between newspapers, the organization of the labour press on a national level, the different rules regarding the state subsidy to newspapers and the extent to which the labour press in the two countries reaches readers of a different political preference. The main findings are that the Norwegian system for press subsidy has to a large extent encouraged competition between newspapers, which has gained the labour press. Theaftermath of the second world war was positive for the Norwegian labour press, and the Swedish labour press struggled with management at a central level during the 1980’s. In conclusion, this thesis challenges the established theory regarding press competition in Sweden, as it is not directly applicable on the Norwegian press.

In this study, we research how Islam and muslims are portrayed in Rapport, the highest rated daily news broadcast in Swedish television. We have done this by applying the Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA) to our material, news reports of April 2014. The theoretical basis of this report derive from theories concerning islamophobia. These are theories that state how unfounded hostility towards Islam result in various forms of discrimination against muslims throughout society. Our premise has been that language and media constitute how the public perceive the world and their own place within it. In effect, a unilateral media portrayal of islam and muslims will produce and reproduce negative conceptions of muslims. To analyze how islam is represented in Rapport we have applied four analytical themes on our material: content and subject, muslims in society, language and imagery, islam and stereotypes. Our results show that the news reports with a muslim connection were homogenous and consisted mostly of news from abroad. Most of the reports had a negative spin, concerning violence, terrorist organisations, child marriage, refugees, murders of journalists and prisoners with a death sentence. Prior studies about the portrayal of muslims in news broadcasting have had similar results as our, both internationally and in Sweden. The result of the analysis indicate that Rapport apply their own diversity plan, created to avoid stereotypical portrayals of ethnic and religious groups. At the same it seems islamophobic tendencies are altogether to be found in Rapport’s news reporting. Considering that the Swedes have less negative attitudes towards Islam today, than 25 years ago, the media image should be more diversified.

We live in a segregated world. Power, money and hierarchies determine your circumstances in life as well as your ability to appear in and take advantage of the media. Research reports have for decades described how the media is part of creating a discourse that produces and reproduces a stereotypical image of the suburb and its inhabitants. From the first images of the suburb as the ”modern otherness” in the 1960s, we are today facing the description of socially and economically troubled neighbourhoods as synonymous with a fuzzy concept of immigrants and an unspecified threat against ”us”. Through choice of words and organization of texts we create an ”us” and ”them” – we, who are inside, in the center, we who are the norm and included, in contrast to the other, who is frightened, different and outside.