In today’s society media constitutes an arena with the opportunity for social communication. The arena is made up of subjective opinions that often leads to free debates about the subjects written about. The recent refugee situation has been highlighted in Swedish media during 2015 and has received widespread attention from various media outlets. The purpose of this paper is to examine how different Swedish newspapers chooses to portray the arriving asylumseekers. The material used is a selection of editorial pages in five daily newspapers. The theories used to evaluate how the newspapers are portraying the asylum seekers is the framing theory and agenda-setting theory. This research uses a qualitative case study approach that is complemented with a media analysis. The results of the research indicate that editorial writers do not differentiate in their description between different ethnic or cultural groups that are seeking asylum. Rather, there is a strong focus in writing about how the refugees are contributing negatively in the development of the Swedish society. The results also showed an indication that the content differs depending on the political standing of the newspaper.

In recent years a wave of right-wing populist parties has sweep in Europe. Two of these are Sweden’s Swedish Democrats and Norway’s Progress Party. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to research on how political parties are portrayed in mainstream media and how that may influence political party success in the elections. Content of two daily newspapers over two months before the last parliamentary elections in Sweden and Norway is examined within the study. The method used is a quantitative content analysis. The result was added to the agenda setting theory. From the result, an analysis was conducted to reveal how publication in newspapers can be expected to affect or not affect the selected parties’ successes in the elections. The result shows that the Progress Party receives more space in the daily press than the Swedish Democrats. Both parties are often mentioned in relation to other parties. In several articles, other parties want to show that there is a difference between their basic values, as opposed to the right-wing populist parties. Negative value words appear in the articles, especially in the case of the Swedish Democrats. There are both negative and neutral values in the case of the Progress Party. However, the articles often appear in a neutral way. The conclusion is that the daily press does not seem to have influence over the political parties’ successes in the elections in this case.

Suitable Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) is necessary for the full enjoyment of human rights. In 2019, Scotland made history as the first country to take such a hands on approach to ensuring MHM, when it placed the ‘Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Bill (2019)’ on its political agenda. The bill aims to provide free period products to all those who need, across the whole of Scotland. It also aims to combat the stigma that currently dominates menstruation discourses. This thesis takes a targeted approach and investigates the bill from the perspective of Agenda-Setting Theories to start the process of understanding how this issue gained a place on the Scottish political agenda. Specifically, it employs a discourse analysis to examine how the issue was defined in the bill at hand, in order to highlight key signs that might have impacted its success. The thesis finds that the bill makes an important connection between MHM and the social struggles for gender equality and socioeconomic equality which has the effect of increasing the social significance of the issue. Additionally the bill is found to situate itself within the framework of international human rights norms which has a legitimizing effect on its claim.

Magister Public Health - MPH / This study analyses media representations of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) in two Ugandan daily English newspapers. FGM/C is recognized by the World Health Organization as an extreme form of violation of the rights, health and integrity of women and girls. In Uganda, although the overall prevalence of FGM/C is 0.3 percent of the population, FGM/C remains a harmful practice that constitutes a serious threat to the health of women and girls in communities that practice it. Despite existence of a national legal and policy framework that discourages FGM/C, progress in the eradication of the practice remains slow.

The increasing presence of sustainability in multiple contexts of today’s societies has led to the phe- nomenon of proliferating representations of the term. A lack of consensus towards the terminology within theory and media representations formed the base for uncertain understandings in public. Corre- spondingly, this supports the argument for investigating the public’s representation of sustainability to contribute knowledge about the current understanding of the term in public. As a platform for open and globalized communication, social media, Instagram in specific, is considered as the research field for investigation. In detail, this analysis aims to investigate large-scale user-generated data with the ‘#sus- tainability’ on Instagram as the research context, to provide knowledge on the users’ representation of the phenomenon. A mixed-method approach of computational and human-driven qualitative and quan- titative content analysis enriched the scope of the analysis to an amount of 50.000 Instagram posts. Correspondingly, the analysis of over 770.000 co-occurred hashtags within the posts allowed a contex- tualization of the phenomenon to key themes represented by the platform’s users. According to framing and agenda-setting theory as theoretical frameworks of this thesis, the findings reveal a dominant fram- ing of sustainability from an environmental perspective, in correlation to the current media agenda. Moreover, the results disclose four key meta-frames, indicating dominant patterns of representing sus- tainability in the context of Eco-Efficiency, Accountability, Consumerism, and Identity. In addition to that, the findings revealed primarily positive framing towards sustainability by the public.The theoretical contribution is an analytical investigation of sustainability representation on Insta- gram, whereby co-occurred themes help to guide further initiatives to improve behavior change and the shift towards a sustainable future.

While the traditional agenda-setting theory assumes that a unified issue salience pattern (“the agenda”) will transfer from news media to the public, the emergence of the Internet has challenged this classic communication theory in three ways: by providing two versions of the public agenda (i.e., self-reported issue importance measured by a survey versus social media expressions), by affording two versions of the media agenda (i.e., presented on news websites versus on organizations’ Twitter accounts), and by enabling potential two-way agenda-setting effects. This dissertation aims to construct a multi-version two-way agenda-setting framework via (1) elaborating on the theoretical and practical reasons behind the proposed framework and (2) empirically testing the framework by combining survey and digital texts data around the 2020 US presidential election. The results show an imbalanced two-way agenda-setting relationship, with the traditional media-to-public direction still stronger than the reverse. While the two versions of the media agenda were similar to each other, what people thought was found to be different from what they tweeted. This dissertation also explored the moderating effects of issue-, media-, and individual-level characteristics on the direction and strength of the agenda-setting effects. The issue-wise comparison showed stronger effects in both directions among obtrusive issues, compared to non-obtrusive issues. Interestingly, traditional, non-digital-native media presented a slightly stronger two-way agenda-setting relationship between their news tweets and citizens' tweets compared to digital-native media. This difference, however, was not found in news websites. Individuals with specific characteristics, such as being females, being older, being white, as well as having lower income, lower opinion leadership, and lower social capital, were more likely to influence and be influenced by the media agendas compared to their counterparts. Also, while the well-educated population followed the agenda of news websites more closely, the group with a lower education level followed news tweets on more issues. Finally, the last chapter discusses theoretical, methodological, and practical implications.

I denna fallstudie har vi undersökt hur en krigsfilm kan använda sig av olika gestaltningar och representationer av “vi och dem” och därför riskerar att sprida propaganda och därigenom även potentiellt påverka dagordningen genom att påverka den rådande diskursen. Vi valde filmen American Sniper som empiriskt material då den är baserad på verkliga händelser och att vi därför kan se huruvida detta påverkar möjligheten att använda spelfilm för att potentiellt påverka diskursen. Genom användandet av en multimodal kritisk diskursanalys har vi tittat närmare på innehållet och maktrelationerna i filmen, för att slutligen kunna besvara följande frågeställningar:  Hur representeras och gestaltas “vi och dem” genom orientalism, nationalism och patriotism i innehållet?  Hur fungerar dessa fenomen tillsammans för att skapa ett innehåll som kan upplevas som propagerande?  Hur fungerar dessa fenomen tillsammans för att skapa en diskurs som potentiellt kan påverka dagordningen?  Analysen lutar sig mot ett teoretiskt ramverk bestående av representationsteori, gestaltningsteori, “vi och dem”, orientalism, patriotism, nationalism, propaganda och dagordningsteori. Studien analyserar scener från filmen valda utefter den anglosaxiska dramaturgiska kurvan. Genom att använda oss av analyskategorierna lexikala val, visuella val, narrativa strukturer och sociala aktörer tittar vi närmare på gestaltning och representation för att upptäcka olika framställningar av “vi och dem” i form av orientalism, nationalism och patriotism för att kunna besvara den första frågeställningen. I diskussionen redogör vi för hur dessa fenomen potentiellt skulle kunna ha inflytande över dagordning och att det med hjälp av olika strategier även kan sprida mjuk propaganda, vilket besvarar den andra och tredje frågeställningen. Resultatet i studien sammanfattas med att “vi och dem” gestaltas genom ofördelaktiga gestaltningar och en brist på individualitet vilket visar på orientalistiska diskurser i filmen. Detta, ihop med enbart positiva skildringar av de egna i filmen, visar upp nationalistiska drag. Genom hela filmen finns en känsla av patriotism genom huvudpersonens brinnande kärlek för sitt land och sin vilja att dö för att skydda det. Genom dessa gestaltningar blir innehållet i filmen vinklat på ett fördelaktigt sätt för USA och tack vare att filmen blev en biosuccé och fick stort erkännande i filmkretsar så kan innehållet komma att påverka diskursen och eventuellt även dagordningen. Därigenom tillåts det propagandistiska och vinklade innehållet att spridas till amerikanska invånare såväl som resterande delar av världen. / In this case study we have examined how a war movie can use different types of framings and representations of “us and them” and therefore run the risk of spreading propaganda and thereby potentially influence the agenda. We chose the movie American Sniper as our empirical material because it is based upon true events and real persons and we can therefore expect to see how this potentially affects the ability to influence the public opinion. Through the use of a multimodal critical discourse analysis we have looked closer on the movie’s content and the power relations within the movie to be able to answer our question at issue:   How does the movie represent and frame “us and them” through the use of orientalism, nationalism and patriotism?  How do this phenomenon work together to create  a content that could be seen as  propagandistic?  How do these phenomena work together to create a discourse that could potentially influence the agenda?   The theoretical framework used in the analysis consists of representation theory, framing theory, orientalism, “us and them”, patriotism, nationalism, propaganda and agenda setting theory. The study analyzes scenes from the movie chosen from the building stones of the classical dramaturgy. By applying the analaysis categories of lexical choices visual choices, narrative structure and social actors can we take a closer look at the framing and representation to discover different fabrications of  “us and them” in the form of orientalsim, nationalism and patriotism to be able to answer the first question at issue.  In the discussion we have given an account of these phenomena’s influence over the agenda setting and how they, with the help of different strategies, could spread “soft propaganda”, which answers the second question at issue. The result of the study can be summarized with the facts that “us and them” appears through the use of disadvantageous portrayals and the lack of individuality which shows the orientalistic discourses in the movie. This, combined with only positivistic depiction of “us” in the movie, shows nationalistic features. Throughout the movie a feeling of patriotism is mediated through the main character’s love for his country and the fact that he is willing to die to protect it. Through these representations the content is framed in a way that is beneficial for the US. And because American Sniper became a blockbuster and got recognized in the film industry with several awards and nominations, the movie’s content can influence the discourse and furthermore perhaps the agenda. Through this the propagandistic content is distributed to American citizens as well as the rest of the world.

Since the 1990s, Sweden's societies has changed in terms of the prevalence and spread of criminal environments. Gun violence in criminal environments has become more frequent and has grown during the last couple of years. The police explains the increased gun violence through organized crime. Previous research has showed that newspapers portrayal of gang crime lacks in a distinct definition of the criminality and are more likely to use condescending descriptions rather than positive ones. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate how the Swedish news media portray and describe gang crime in terms of attribute and definition. To enable the survey, a qualitative content analysis with a limited selection of newspaper articles were used. The study has been conducted with two theories, framing theory and the agenda-setting theory to create an understanding of the news media's presentation of gang crime. To achieve the aim of the study, 18 articles in three newspapers were used in a process of coding to highlight the descriptions of gang crime. The results of the study demonstrated in two main categories and six subcategories. The results of the collected empirical evidence showed that gang crime was presented mainly in a negative way to describe vulnerable areas, young men, shootings and rappers. The results also showed that the definition in Swedish news media is vague and lacks a clear description of what the issue is about.

In this essay the framing of the politics of the two prime minister candidates Magdalena Andersson and Ulf Kristersson have been analyzed. This during two interviews broadcasted before the election 2022 on public service channel 1 (SVT 1) in a program called Election 2022: The Hearing (Val 2022: Utfrågningen). The study has looked at several different types of framing including thematic, episodic and gameframing to be able to analyze how the politics are portrayed. The study has also acknowledged the importance of the power relations that take place between interviewee and journalist in a political interview. Also how the role of the journalist acting as a program manager affects the framing of the politics. The conclusion is that politics are framed in all kinds of framing analyzed. But there are differences between how Andersson and Kristersson´s politics are framed through the analyzed frames. The program managers had different strategies to confront the politicians depending on who they interviewed.

In order for a democracy to fulfill its function, it requires access for information transmission where an exchange of information and opinions occur between citizens and decision-makers. Security and framing correlate with each other since medias’ framing are crucial to understand whether something is considered a threat or a problem. The news media is thus seen as an actor that possesses a certain power through the presentation of threats as it shapes public opinion. This study examines how the Russian threat-images towards Sweden are produced during different time periods and what differences have arisen. In addition, this study aims to investigate how the news medias’ presentation of threat images can influence citizens and decision-makers. This essay consists of a qualitative thematic case study and media analysis where news articles are analyzed in relation to the essays’ chosen theories, which consists of the framing-theory and the agenda-setting-theory. In summary, this study concludes that news media reported on an increased threat picture against Sweden in 2013. However, the focus was mainly on preventive measures and discussions regarding possible measures if the threat would escalate in the future. In 2023, the media changed its tone to emphasize the seriousness and urgency of the situation by using words related to war and danger. The differences between 2013 and 2023 is a more urgent presentation of the threat in 2023. According to the chosen theories, the news medias’ way of presenting the security situation as threatening can result in citizens and decision-makers prioritizing the issue to a greater extent. Based on the material, the news media have mainly focused on the military threat both in 2013 and 2023 but have not to the same extent prioritized reporting regarding other threats that previous research performs. This can result in citizens and decision makers not prioritizing the other threats equally and accordingly not taking sufficient measures.