Hur ser berättelsen om svensk gängkriminalitet ut i tre aktuella reportageböcker och med vilken berättarteknik är den konstruerad? Med en blandning av narratologisk och medieretorisk analysmetod undersöker den här artikeln hur innehåll och form samspelar i Mammorna av Alexandra Pascalidou, Familjen av Johanna Bäck- ström Lerneby och Tills alla dör av Diamant Salihu. En slutsats är att skiftande berättarperspektiv kan motverka ensidighet, samtidigt som narrativ medkänsla utan parallell narrativ inlevelse kan hindra läsarens möjlighet att föreställa sig de skildrade människornas situation. Dramatiserade händelseförlopp kan öka närvarokänslan, medan en reporter som ifrågasätter sin egen auktoritet uppmuntrar läsaren till att undvika förenklande slutsatser. Till sist bidrar person- beskrivningar och urval av fakta i de tre böckerna till skilda budskap. Studien visar att reportagegenren tack vare sin narrativa form har potential att skildra samhällsproblem på komplexa sätt. Detta gäller särskilt när gestaltningen kombineras med gedigen faktaresearch.
The study explores the perspectives of political parties regarding news media coverage in election campaigns. By analyzing official post-election analyses produced by Swedish political parties from 2010 to 2022, the study offers a novel approach to the study of political party views of news media. The findings largely support the arguments proposed by mediatization literature, highlighting the significance of media in party communication. Parties display eagerness to attract positive media attention while expressing regret over inadequate or negative publicity. More surprisingly, there is a lack of references to media bias in the reports, suggesting that the hostile media effect is not a major concern among Swedish parties. Despite criticisms related to irrelevant reporting and perceived negative coverage, party perceptions towards the media remains predominantly neutral. The study contributes to the understanding of the complex relationship between political parties and news media in the context of election campaigns.
Journalism is considered to fulfil a societal watchdog role. However, research indicates that local news rarely lives up to established state-of-the-art definitions of investigative journalism. Therefore, this article argues that the assessment of local accountability journalism must include research on the extent to which it assumes a societal watchdog role in a more basic sense, namely by being critical of events and conditions in the local society in some way. A content analysis of approximately 1600 articles in three local Swedish newspapers shows that criticism, even in its mildest form, constitutes less than a fifth of the overall output, and that journalists themselves are the agents of criticism in less than 15 % of the critical articles, disregarding editorials, and that they more often criticize national than local power. In news articles, journalists are less often agents of criticism than both politicians, the public, and representatives of organizations. Actors in the public sphere are targets of criticism in 75 % of the critical articles, whereas those articles rarely target the private sector or civil society.
I januari valåret 2010 publicerade Svenska Dagbladet en gruppbild av alla åtta partiledare. Bilden är ett exempel på planerad fotojournalistik, men också ett exempel på hur bilders betydelse kan förändras och ges nya tolkningar jämfört med den ursprungliga avsikten. Artikeln analyserar arbetsprocessen bakom bilden utifrån observationer och intervjuer, dess iscensättning och relation till bildjournalistikens normer och traditioner. Det utgår från teorier om pseudohändelser och ikoniska bilder, och analyserar fotografiets estetiska och retoriska kvalitéer. Resultatet visar att processen bakom bilden inrymmer en rad ambivalenser i bildjournalisternas självförståelse och syn på pressfotografi. Det visar också att den process som skapar ikoniska bilder är komplicerad och oförutsägbar. Mediernas representationer av politiker kan planeras, men också omtolkas i mötet med publiken.
In autumn 2017 in Sweden, the #MeToo movement and sexual assault became a focus of broad debate. Swedish media coverage of the movement was centered around the many petitions made by anonymous groups of women to illuminate the extent of the problem of sexual assault, as well as a few cases of accusations against well-known and powerful men in both the culture and media industries. In order to elicit common representations of men and their female accusers, this study applies critical discourse analysis (CDA) to news media coverage and Facebook comments of three of those accused men: TV personality Martin Timell, journalist Fredrik Virtanen and culture personality Jean-Claude Arnault. The results indicate that representations of women as both witnesses and heroines work to reinforce notions of female responsibility as a means to halt sexual assault, while representations of men as sexual predators build on demarcations of illegal and mere misogynistic or “bad” behavior, which in turn reinforce notions of male victimhood. These representations point to legal discourse as hegemonic, as it seems to limit the discussion and only present individual solutions, such as women bearing witness, to the structural problem of sexual assault. Simultaneously, the results indicate that the #MeToo movement and other feminist discourse have also had an effect on news media representations of sexual assault by broadening the concept beyond the consent/rape dichotomy.
This study explores the impact of organizational changes on news-paper photo departments, an area of newsrooms that has arguably been particularly affected by structural changes in the field of jour-nalism. Through qualitative interviews with editors responsible for photojournalism at five Swedish newspapers that have experienced recent changes to photo staffing and routines for the sourcing of images, the study explores the following questions: Which routines do the newspapers have for sourcing images, in terms of in-house staff and external sources? How do notions of visual quality and external factors, such as audiences and competition, contribute to shaping the newspapers’ visual strategies? Findings indicate that newspapers rely on staff photojournalists for unique and in-depth coverage, but less for routine and breaking news. A certain expansion of photojournalism was found in some newsrooms where it is seen as a competitive edge; which, in part, challenges a “discourse of doom.” An uncertainty about the support for visual strategies in newsrooms lacking visual leadership was also found.