Motivation: The aim of this study has been to conduct a comparative study concerning how race, ethnicity and class is represented in American contrary to Swedish daily press and from there on to explore and explain similarities and differences that have been found in the material. Problem statement: • How is race, ethnicity and class represented in American contrary Swedish daily press? • What are the similarities and differences between the countries’ daily news flow? • What causes the similiarities and differences to achieve their current form? Material: The material which has been the subject of this study consists of eight articles – four American articles (USA Today) and four Swedish articles (Dagens Nyheter). The material has been elected to meet certain criterias and mainly discusses the effects the health care reform will have on the American population. Approach: The material has been approached by using theories concerned with race, ethnicity, class and framing. The method used to analyze the material was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Results: The results shows significant similarities, although mainly differences, between the countries’ daily news flow. The working class is offered limited space in American as well as Swedish newspaper reporting. Class is used as a tool to categorize the figurants in the material and to give them certain authority. The authority given is demonstrated by the allowance of drawing conclusions, something which is restriced to the capitalist class and upper middle class. The occurence of race and ethnicity differs and is only perceivable in Swedish media. The American articles appear more detailed in describing pros and cons with the health care reform while the Swedish articles mainly describe the negative effects of the current health care system. Conclusion: Swedish press invokes the ethnicity concept in correlation with non-whites. The race concept is invoked in correlation with the white race’s raceless power. The reason could be that ethnicity is not rated as rasism and has retrieved a positive affirmative, although it does reinforce the concept of portraying only non-whites as poor. It has been found unlikely that American press does not correlate with neither race nor ethnicity because they simply have not interviewed non-white people. The similarities are thought to be a result of Western similarities and differences are results of political and cultural national differences.

Research question: What role does media play in that xenophobic political parties becomes successful or not? Cohan explains it as:“The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”    According to this, researchers argue that media creates a supply factor by merely bring attention to certain phenomenon. To this background, it is reasonable to suspect that media, merely bringing attention to the Sweden Democrats, has brought visibility anf attention to the party that could be essential for the Sweden Democrats success. research question for this study is: How does the local media-coverage of the Sweden Democrats have a role in the party’s success, in a municipality where the party is successful compared to a municipality where the political support is weaker?  Purpose: The purpose of this study is, before the elections for the municipal council in 1998, 2002 and 2006, systematically review the local press media-coverage of the Sweden Democrats in Karlskrona, a municipality where the Sweden Democrats are successful and Växjö, a municipality where the party is not as much successful.   Method: To fulfill my purpose of this study, I studied all articles concerning the Sweden Democrats before a few months before the elections of 1998, 2002 and 2006 in Smålandsposten and Blekinge Läns Tidning. The articles were then reviewed systematically and then later categorized through certain categories. This contributed to what had been written about the Sweden Democrats. Conclusions: The hypothesis that media, unaware, has created a foundation for the success of the Sweden Democrats has been confirmed to some extent in this study. The media coverage the Sweden Democrats was not as frequent as it was when the party began to have political success. Local media’s focus in their articles about the Sweden Democrats differs from a strong municipality for the Sweden Democrats to a municipality with weaker support..    This study has also shown that in municipalities that have weak support for the Sweden Democrats tend to stigmatize the party more than in a municipality that is strong for the Sweden Democrats. However as this study has shown is that stigmatization of the Sweden Democrats has not slown down their success. Quite the opposite, it has gained their success

Purpose/aim: This study was performed in order to describe how Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is reported in Swedish daily newspapers during a five-year period. MMA is a relative new sport in Sweden and it is important that the description by the Swedish daily newspapers is accurate and balanced. Then this sport will have the same opportunities to grow as already well-established sports in Sweden.  Material/Method: The material consists of 159 articles from six different daily newspapers gathered from 2006-12-07 to 2011-12-07. Quantitative content analysis is used to investigate how the newspapers describe MMA. The result from this quantitative analysis are then compiled, analysed and discussed by applying theories of agenda setting, framing and moral panic.  Main results: The result shows that the Swedish daily newspapers give a relative neutral and balanced picture in their coverage of MMA but they are affected to a certain degree of moral panic. A neutral framing of MMA was common in the majority of the newspapers. Swedish newspapers have fulfilled the requirements that you should have on balanced journalism. A majority of the articles described MMA with more or less deviancy and therefore made MMA “Folk Devils”. Further there was a consensus among politicians and other right-thinking people that MMA is a threat to and is dangerous to society. The negative reporting of MMA in the daily newspapers is volatile with one-year cycles with start in late 2009. With one quarter of the articles describing MMA as a problem, there is preconception that MMA is likely to have a negative impact on society. There is a disproportion in the reporting of MMA as a threat as “Swedish Sports” have approved MMA as a sport, but still report it as a problem. Therefore there is some kind of moral panic about MMA in Swedish daily newspaper.

On the 15th of May 2011 the former leader of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was accused of sexually assaulting a maid in a hotel room in New York. Strauss-Kahn was cleared of all charges on the 23rd of August 2011 since it could not be proven that he had forced the maid to have sexual relations with him. The purpose of this study is to examine how the case was framed in two Swedish newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Aftonbladet. Svenska Dagbladet is a broadsheet newspaper and Aftonbladet is a tabloid newspaper. The purpose of this study is also to find differences and similarities in the framing of the case in broadsheet newspapers and tabloid newspapers. The study is primarily based on two different theories; the framing theory and the tabloidization theory. The method used is critical discourse analysis based on van Dijks theories and methods. A total of ten articles were examined, five from Svenska Dagbladet and five from Aftonbladet. Our result revealed that both Svenska Dagbladet and Aftonbladet used dramaturgical methods like exaggeration and speculation in their reporting. The two newspapers also constructed the storyline about the persons involved in a similar way. These results indicate that the gap between how broadsheet newspapers and tabloid newspapers write their stories is decreasing.

Det svenska väljarbeteendet har förändrats med åren. Allt fler byter mellan olika partier och beslutet för vart rösten hamnar tas allt senare in i valrörelsen. Medierna är medborgarnas främsta källa till information och den lokala dagstidningen är den källa som flest människor använder sig av. Då orienteringsbehovet är som störst bland medborgarna, som i samband med val, ökar mediernas makt att påverka. I denna studie var syftet att undersöka hur lokala medier gestaltar den politiska rapporteringen i samband med valrörelser, hur det journalistiska förhållningssättet såg ut och om det skett någon förändring över tid. Studien har genomförts med en kvantitativ innehållsanalys på landsortstidningarna Östgöta Correspondenten och Nya Wermlands-Tidningen med material från de två sista veckorna vid valrörelserna 2002 och 2010. Resultatet visade att det är den sakpolitiska gestaltningen och det beskrivande journalistiska förhållningssättet som dominerar den lokala politiska rapporteringen. Den spelgestaltade journalistiken ökade något mellan åren men annars var skillnaderna inte speciellt stora. / The Swedish electoral behavior has changed over the years. An increasing number of people switch between different parties and the decision for each vote is taken later and later into the election campaign. The media is the main source of information for the citizens, and the local newspaper is the source that most people use. When the need of orientation is strong among the citizens, like during the election, medias power to influence increases. In this study the purpose was to investigate how the local media framing political news during election campaigns, how the journalistic approach looked like and if there was any changes over time. The study was conducted by a quantitative content analysis of the provincial newspapers Östgöta Correspondenten and Nya Wermlands-Tidningen with material from the last two weeks of the election campaign in 2002 and 2010. The results showed that it is the issue oriented framing and the descriptive journalistic approach that dominates the local political reporting. The game framed journalism increased slightly between years, but otherwise the differences were not very large.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur Aftonbladet skildrade det Socialdemokratiska varumärket och dess kärnvärden under nyhetsrapporteringen av partiledarens bidragsfusk, studien undersöker även vad partiet står för i syfte att kunna jämföra med hur det skildrades i Aftonbladet.  För att kunna undersöka detta är denna uppsats uppdelad i två undersökningar. Den första undersökningen är en kvalitativ samtalsintervju som undersöker vad partiet står för i syfte att kunna jämföra med hur det skildrades i Aftonbladet. Samtalsintervjun ska endast fungera som ett redskap i att bilda oss en uppfattning om vilka Socialdemokraterna är. Tyngdpunkten i studien ligger på den andra undersökningen som är en kvalitativ textanalys vars syfte är att undersöka hur Aftonbladet skildrade det socialdemokratiska varumärket och dess kärnvärden under nyhetsrapporteringen av partiledarens bidragsfusk.  Slutsatserna som undersökningarna har resulterat i är att partiet inte skildrades enligt den önskvärda bilden som Socialdemokraterna har av sig själv, som bland annat är att vara ett jämlikt, rättvist och kompetent parti. Resultatet visade att Aftonbladet skildrade händelsen som en skandal, där händelsen i hög grad utvecklades till en partifråga snarare än en personfråga i och med att partiledaren anses vara partiet. Överlag hade nyhetsrapporteringen en sensationaliserad karaktär där större delen av innehållet hade någon form av spekulation eller hårdvinkling, vilket kan skapa omedelbara effekter på partiets varumärke.

This dissertation attempts to interpret the statements of Ludwig Mies vans der Rohe (1886-1969) that pertain to his lifelong theory of Baukunst, or the art of building in terms of tectonics. In order to use the concept tectonics as a criterion according to which one can comprehend Mies words and works, this dissertation attempted to define tectonics in a more general sense by collecting existing definitions and categorizing them. The result of this endeavor showed that tectonics does not signify a supportive structure but the art of framing construction, in which linear elements are put together with joints and clad or infilled with lightweight material. It is proposed that Mies, who called the ideal of tectonic architecture the art of building, during his lifelong career, experienced two periods of critical awareness through which he established his own type of tectonic buildings: awareness of the open plan and then that of clear space. After the former occurred in 1926, he focused on the creation of inner spatial openness; after the latter, which this dissertation proposes occurred around 1930, when he met Karlfried Graf Drckheim (1896-1988), who had been absorbed in Lao-tzus philosophy, Mies intended to show that his architectural concern was beyond physical construction by employing the concept of changing nature and by designing his buildings to be neutral frames. Mies finally achieved a tectonically integrated body of a building that contained extroverted and undetermined space, which he referred to as clear space, or generally called Mies universal space, through his lifelong pursuit for the accomplishment of his own art of building, which this dissertation terms Miesian tectonics.

This paper contains two parts. First, we study the decoy effect (especially for the compromise decoy effect) by the experiments where the subjects face the trade-off of inflation and unemployment. As earlier studies show that the compromise decoy is not good as dominated decoy, we try to explore factors of determining compromise effect. Second, we investigate the factors affecting the subjects¡¦ preference over unemployment and inflation. In Part 1, we explore how to enhance the compromise decoy effect by changing the relative location among target, compromise, and decoy. It emerges that the distance between target and decoy, the distance between target and competitor, and the existence of the dominated decoy all affect the size of the compromise decoy effect. In Part 2, we explore the relation of subjects¡¦ preference over inflation and unemployment and their personal characteristics, such as location of hometown, the attitude toward risk, political participation, ideology, household income, knowledge of related terminology, whether to take related course or not, and friends¡¦ and relatives¡¦ unemployment status, and so on. Though the direction of effects is in line with our conjecture, the level of significance is not high enough.

Based on the Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the Impression Formation Theory by Fiske and Neuberg (1990), this research examines decision makers¡¦ information attention for subjects who are required to judge under framing. The eye-tracking technology is applied to evaluate decision makers¡¦ information attention. The results indicate that, as predicted by the Prospect Theory, the effect of framing is observed in both positive and negative framed conditions. Overall, the study finds that subjects in negative frames exert more effort in information attention than those in positive frames. Concerning the effect of the need for cognition (NC) trait in negative framing conditions, the finding shows that subjects who have a higher level of NC exert more effort in information attention than the low NC subjects. In addition, subjects with high a higher level of math ability focus exert more attentional effort on possible outcomes and probabilities in positive framing but not in negative framing. Finally, the result shows that there is no relationship between information attention and the framing effect, indicating that the framing effect is resilient to the influence of information attention effort induced by both the personality traits like NC and the mechanism like deep thought. Collectively, these results pave the way for future research to study cognitive processes under framing so that we can understand how different information representations may increase or lessen the effect of framing.

<p>As a starting point the society is more enlightened and has gained a greater awareness about the gender power structures and its different forms. Present research shows the continuous development into other shapes and comes into different expressions that might be unrecognised. In order to gain knowledge about the present structure of the gender power structure system, the aim of this study was to investigate framing of female and male politicians in media. The main question asked was: “are there framing differences in the portraits of the male and female politicians?” In order to achieve results articles in the biggest Swedish daily newspaper were examined. The method used was a mixed qualitative/quantitative content analysis where theory linked questions were created in order to ask these directly to the text. The results of the study showed that the framings of female versus male politicians were based on traditional gender power structures, though not to the extent the theory claims. More importantly, the result showed that the marginalization of female politicians was made by inclusion and exploiting instead of exclusion. In this way the differences between the genders were shown.</p>