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.

On subsequent days, the 18th and 19th of December 2012, large groups of young people gathered to protest in the centre of Gothenburg. The gatherings mainly occurred outside two high schools: Plusgymnasiet and Framtidsgymnasiet. The reason behind the gathering has often been explained by the young people’s reaction to an Instagram account, on which offensive pictures and comments of and about young boys and girls had been published. As a reaction to the protest, police force including helicopters and mounted police, was sent to the streets. Disorder occurred. The high schools were closed. About 20 protesters were temporarily taken in to custody. Ever since, the events has, in Swedish mass-media, often been referred to as the “Instagram-riots” or the “Instagram-uprising”. Our study aims, with help from Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA) and a quantitative content analysis, to show how this protest was framed in four Swedish newspapers: Aftonbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, Göteborg-Tidningen and Metro Göteborg. The study is based on the theoretical perspective of framing, it’s components, and on earlier research of protests. The mass-media today possess a powerful position. By framing they may affect how the public will understand and evaluate a protest-movement. Our major findings show that violent elements of a “riot”, episodic interpretations of cause and solution, a coverage mainly based on police sources, and a negative tone is prominent in framing the events.

Title: ”Varför går man inte hårdare fram? – En studie i krigsorienterad journalistik av Public Service från Ukrainakonflikten” Authors: Cemil Arikan, Staffan Florén Sandberg and Karl Henrik Olsson Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies, Dept. of journalism, media and communication (JMG) Gothenburg University Term: Spring 2014 Supervisor: Mathias Färdigh, JMG, Gothenburg University Pages/words: 48 pages/16701 words Purpose: The main purpose of the paper was to examine if and to what extent the conflict coverage of two Swedish public service news programmes from the ongoing Ukrainian conflict could be said to orientate towards either war or peace journalism. Method: Quantitative and qualitative content analysis Procedure: News broadcasts from Rapport 19:30 and Dagens Eko kvart-i-fem, covering the Ukrainian conflict, over a period of two months, were analyzed from the normative perspective of Johan Galtung’s peace journalism theory and Wilhelm Kempf’s theory of war and peace discourse. Results: Both Rapport and Dagens Eko were found orientating towards war journalism. Reports were given, in a great extent, to events of violence and verbal threats. The conflict was largely conceptualized and constructed as a competitive struggle between Russia on the one side and Ukraine with its western allies on the other.

Title: Two sides of the same coin. A quantative content analysis of how Swedish daily press frames begging Authors: Mirjam Hultin, Linda Moström & Caroline Widenheim Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies Location: Dept. of journalism, media and communication (JMG) University of Gothenburg Term: Spring 2014 Supervisor: Britt Börjesson, JMG, University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 45 (excluding appendix) Background: During the late twentieth century, there was a debate in the daily press concerning the increase of homeless and beggars in Stockholm. Voices arose wanting to make it illegal to beg, especially in the subways. Today, the issue is again up for debate now focusing on the increase of migrants from poor countries of the European Union. Purpose: The main purpose is to examine how the phenomena beggary is portrayed in the daily press. We aimed to make a comparison between two periods, 1997-2000 and 2007-2013, and between different newspapers. Method: A quantitative content analysis of four major Swedish newspapers using a digital archive and a search string designed to sort out all articles concerning beggars in Sweden. A total of 352 articles from four major newspapers from the first and the second period were coded and analysed. Results: In our compared periods of time, we met two different portrayals of people begging and beggary. The person who is begging is in most cases being talked about and may rarely be heard, while as politicians and/or office holders are most frequent as main agents. In the nineties, the person begging is (implicitly) swedish, while during the 21st century, half of the articles presents the “beggar” to be from Romania. The most common is to not state a cause to the beggary, but when they did in the nineties the most common was homelessness, addiction and poverty. In the 21st century, the most common cause is poverty, though it is interesting that coercion and discrimination never was mentioned in the nineties, while today it’s mentioned frequently.

Title: Schibbye och Persson’s Journey: a qualitative analysis of Göteborgs-Posten’s coverage of ”etiopiensvenskarna” from a narrative perspective. Authors: Viktor Eriksson and Max Sommerstein Subject: Undergraduate research paper in journalism studies, Dept. of journalism, media and communication (JMG) University of Gothenburg Term: Autumn 2013 Supervisor: Mats Ekström, JMG, Gothenburg University Pages: 35 Purpose: To examine how the narrative-model the hero’s journey is represented within the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten’s articles on Johan Persson and Martin Schibbye, two Swedish journalists who were imprisoned while conducting journalism in Ethiopia. Method: A combination of Ethnographic content analysis (ECA) and Compositional Interpretation (image-analysis). Procedure: A strategic selection of articles published in the supplement Skenprocessen i Addis Abeba, in Göteborgs-Posten. Results: The narrative model the hero’s journey is clearly represented as cultural frames in Göteborgs-Posten’s articles about Martin Schibbye and Johan Persson. The framing of the events are used to simplify the facts and to make them emotionally accessible. We have also determined that the steps of the model largely follow the same chronology in the articles as it does in the hero’s journey. All in all, we have determined that journalism and myth has a closer relationship than one might think.

Authors: Elina Haimi, Emelie Nordh, Kattis Sundén Title: What happens when two becomes one? Level: Bachelor of Journalism Location: University of Gothenburg Language: Swedish Number of pages: 50 A simple rule that any handbook in journalism will tell you is that it’s better, if not necessary, to have at least two different sources, rather than one, when you tell a story. This will keep information accurate and non-biased. You will get closer to the truth if you hear more people. We started to wonder if this would be the case with news papers as well. Will you get a more diverse and multifaceted news coverage with more news papers covering a story than one? This curiosity that we had led us to look all over Sweden for examples where two newspaper had emerged into one, or in other words – where one larger newspaper had bought the smaller one. We wanted to compare how the news coverage had changed since the incline in newspapers. Our investigations led us to Karlskoga, a small city with approximately 30 000 inhabitants. Karlskoga Tidning, owned by the NWT-group, bought Karlskoga-Kuriren, owned by Promedia, in 2011. Cuts were being made and the editorial staff shrunk. Now they had one news team instead of two. The company takeover was unique though, due to the fact that they kept two different heads and two different pages with letters to the editor. We carried out a quantitative content analysis in the two newspapers before and after the take over. In total we analyzed 3394 different articles from the years 2000, 2007, 2011, 2012 and 2013. We also conducted some interviews with important people around the newspapers. One example of a conclusion we made is that nowadays the content concists of less politics and more culture events. There are also more common people that get to express their opinions in the articles and less politicians. We also found out that the small places in the region get less coverage than before. Overall we saw that Karskoga Kuriren had had to adjust more to its new owner. It had for example lost a lot of the coverage of Örebro.

This bachelor thesis is a critical study in which we are studying if the swedish reports of the so called “second revolution” in Egypt have been objective. We have been studying this by using Jörgen Westerståhls objectivity model and we have chosen to investigate whether the reports have been objective balance-wise. The second revolution is a term which describes the protests and demonstrations that led to the military action in which the elected president Muhammad Mursi were forced to resign on the 4th of July, 2013 The study includes articles from five leading Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Göteborgs-Posten and Svenska Dagbladet. We have been studying all the articles that include the word “Egypt”. We have been studying how the different participants have been treated by the news media by looking at how many times they get to speak for themselves and how many times they have been mentioned by others and in which way they were mentioned, with praise or criticism. The participants we have defined and studied are the Muslim Brotherhood, the military and the different groups and organizations we have chosen to call the “opposition”. We have also studied where the articles take place to determine whether the reports have been geographically balanced and what the articles is about to see if the reports have been concentrated around the conflict or if it focuses on other topics. We have been studying articles that were published between the 17th of June until the 21st of July, 2013. Two weeks before Mursis resignment, the week of the resignment and two weeks after. Our results show that the reports have been unbalanced in how the different participants are treated in the news media and we have come to the conclusion that they are not objective balance-wise. The military forces are mentioned in a large amount of the articles but they seldom get to speak for themselves. The Muslim Brotherhood and the opposition get to talk about the same amount of times but there is a difference in how they are mentioned. The Brotherhood is more criticized while the opposition is mentioned slightly more positive or neutral. Our results also show that a very large amount of the articles take place in the capital city Cairo. Some articles are about Egypt as a nation but there were very few articles that took place in another town or place than Cairo.