Tala är silver, styra diskursen är guld

Abstract
Title: Speaking is silver, running the discourse is gold
Authors: Adam Kohls Josefsson, Elias Åhlander and Erika Uutela Larsson
Level: Bachelor thesis in Journalism
Term: HT 2022
Supervisor: Monika Djerf-Pierre

Aim of thesis: This essay aims to investigate the framing of actors in climate journalism. To investigate the framing of actors the framing of the news subject climate change was also investigated.

Theoretical framework: An actor for this thesis could be any person or organization that was a part taker or a participant in a news article. The concept of an actor was viewed as a subject as well as an object. Therefore an actor could be quoted or just mentioned in the article. The most central theory for this essay was the theory that viewed framing as a principle of selection and choices. The theory was presented by Anders Hansen (2019). When an article is written by a journalist a big amount of choices is made about what the actor at hand is to be used for in the article. With a quantitative survey a mapping of what choices journalists make in relation to actors could be made. Who is chosen, how will they participate and what role are they playing in the context of the article?

Methods(s): A quantitative survey was executed to map the choices that journalists make in relations to actors. A codebook was constructed with a big amount of variables that was created to be
able to answer the questions at issue. Over 200 actors were collected and different aspects of how they were framed in the articles was coded. The actors were collected from news articles from four of the biggest newspapers in Sweden, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter,
Aftonbladet, and Expressen.

Results: The most common actor was an adult man presented as a politician, who was quoted about the subject of political decisions and was treated in a neutral way. The actor also got to play a responsible role in the article. An important point to make is that there was equalization from 2010 to 2022 regarding how many men and women appeared as actors in the articles. The amount of appearances has gone from being quite uneven in the favor of men to be smoothed
out.