En bild säger mer än 1000 ord

Abstract
A picture says more than 1000 words
Sara Romano and Anja Magnusson
Bachelor thesis in Journalism
HT 2022

The purpose of this essay is to analyze how often female and male athletes are presented in images, captions and headlines on the front pages in the Swedish magazines Aftonbladet and Sportbladet every twelve years in the summer Olympic games from 1936. The intention of
the essay is to establish how female and male athletes are described in Aftonbladet and Sportbladet in relation to nation, achievements, the perspective which the photographs are taken from and the activity of the athletes. In the essay, two theories are addressed, the agenda setting theory and the gender system theory of Hirdman. A quantitative content analysis is applied to answer the study’s first question about how often the athletes appear. The quantitative content analysis is then used to systemize the material. The second question about how athletes are portrayed can be answered through a qualitative method, an image analysis, which is based on the systematized material. The study shows that there is a higher frequency of male athletes on the front pages in the studied material, there were 188 male athletes and 120 females. It was reported more about male than female athletes in all of the analyzed Olympic games except for München 1972 and Tokyo 2020 (2021). In relation to the number of participants there were two years that were distinctive. In 2008, it was reported more about male athletes, while there were more female participants in the Olympics that year. In 2020, it was reported more about female athletes than males and there were also more female participants. The study also shows that there is a strong nationalism in the reporting. In the study 80 percent of the athletes represented Sweden. When it comes to the
achievements of the athletes our study shows that men are more often than women portrayed as winners. The result also presents that male athletes more often than females were portrayed from below. This can be linked to the fact that the male athletes more often than females are portrayed in a position of power when the viewer looks up at the image subject (Fogde, 2013). When it comes to the portrayal of the athletes, males were more often than females portrayed performing their own sport.

Key words: gender, athletics, the Olympic games, Aftonbladet, Sportbladet, sport journalism
Nyckelord: genus, idrott, Olympiska spelen, Aftonbladet, Sportbladet, sportjournalistik