Sweden’s most trusted news distributor, Sveriges Radio (Swedish Public Service radio broadcaster), has high ambitions with the journalism it broadcasts – especially when it comes to gender equality and diversity. This thesis examines how gender is constructed in Dagens Eko (Today’s Echo) to find if and how power structures are expressed language-wise. Queer theory is used to look at how gender is constructed and how one can look at, and question, gender and gender hierarchies. Intersectionality is used to find how different power structures work together, combined with theories about how journalism constructs truth. At the same time the thesis is also evaluating different choices of theories and methods, to find strengths and weaknesses for future research purposes.  The analysis is based on materials from domestic news segments from Dagens Eko, consisting of one week’s broadcasts in January 2015. Critical linguistics is used as a method, with emphasis on Halliday’s functional grammar, as a part of Fairclough’s three-layer model. Through the eye of critical discourse analysis, this study shows that gender is constructed through language, more specifically via categorization and stereotyping. The thesis conducts that the use of so called cases, people who are in the news segments to give a more human perspective on the subject, is problematic because this is as also a way of efficiently constructing stereotypes. The thesis also concludes that while using statistics to present more equal representation in the news, this is not enough.

In this essay a pilot study on the memory of Swedish Public Service radio news is presented. 30 subjects participated in the study, which was performed during three days, 18 to 20 of November 2013. The material which formed the basis for the study consisted three newscasts of Sweden's most popular radio newscast ”Dagens eko”, which is broadcasted live at 16.45 every day in the Public Service channels SR P1 and SR P4. The subjects listened to the broadcasts each day, and their memory of them was tested the day after each broadcast. The aim of the thesis is to find out which properties of the audience that affect how much – and what parts – of a newscast that the audience remember. The properties the study has examined are gender, age, domicile and which other news media the study participants used during each day of the study. The aim of this paper is also to show which properties of the newscasts, and the news stories which they contain, that affect how much and what parts of the newscast the audience remember. No general conclusions can be drawn from the results presented in this paper as it is a pilot study with a limited material. The results presented apply only to the selected subjects in the selected three days. In this pilot study women remembered more news stories from the newscasts than men, listeners older than 50 years remembered more news stories from the newscasts than listeners younger than 50 years and listeners who consumed many other traditional news media during the pilot study remembered more from the newscasts than listeners who did not. Domicile does, according to the results of this pilot studie, not affect the remembrance of a newscast. It was also found that there were large differences regarding how well the different news stories were remembered. Some of the news stories were remembered by almost all subjects, while others were forgotten by the same number. The pilot study suggests that characteristics that increase the remembrance of a novelty are that the news story is a national news story, that it is mentioned in the introductory presentation of the broadcast, that it is presented as one of the three or four first news or at the very end of the broadcast, that it contain at least one interview or a speaker and that it is considered to be sensational. The pilot study also suggests that information about the actors and locations in a news story gets better remembered than information about what the news event actually was, why the news event occurred or what affect it will get.