Problem definition and purpose: The media industry is a sphere faced with constant challenges. Technological inventions and economy are changing the rules of how and what media reports. To be able to stay current and make profit the newspapers have to adapt new thinking and evolve. In Sweden the journalistic union have stated that the line between editorial material and advertisement has became thinner. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the state of three local newspapers today and the ten years back. It will examine if the occurence of what can be define as advetorial news – articles made by the newspapers own reporters but which serve and obvious profit for a second part – has increased or decreased. Method and material: To find an answer to the purpose of this thesis a quantitative content analysis have been done on a total of 1005 local news articles from three Swedish local newspapers in 2005 and 2015. Main result: The result of the content analysis shows that news defined as advetorial occur more frequently in two of the three studied news papers 2015 compared to 2005, while news defined as advetorial decreased in one of the news papers. The result also show that the total number of local news articles has decreased from 2005 to 2015.

Toward the start of the Palestinian Intifada in 2000, activists formed a media watchdog group called Palestine Media Watch (PMW) to challenge U.S. news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tired of coverage that blamed the conflict on Palestinian terrorism, PMW monitored news coverage, met with newsworkers, and bombarded news organizations with complaints in an attempt to root the conflict’s cause in Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. I study PMW’s efforts to produce change in coverage, and examine its campaigns’ effects. Most critical research examines the news system’s production of “propaganda” and news models suggest that media monitoring is one mechanism through which an entire “ideological air” is supported. “Guardian watchdogs,” like the Israel lobby, guard the ideological boundaries around news content that are erected by others. This study considers PMW’s efforts in terms articulated by the dialogic and dialectical models, which gives agency to dissident movements and requires study of the strategic interactions between media and movements to understand framing struggles. These models suggest that “dissident watchdogs,” like PMW, can affect news coverage. What is not clear is the extent to which dissident watchdogs can affect news content when they can make appeals that resonate with professional journalism but that do not resonate with the country’s ideological air. I examine PMW’s strategies to produce content changes between 2000 and 2004, detail the group’s interactions with newsworkers, and document the outcomes of those interactions to understand the struggle to affect media framing. The watchdog, when it systematically monitored coverage and individually critiqued news staff, produced substantive changes in content and practice but these were limited in number. When the watchdog bombarded news organizations with complaints it was able to produce several superficial changes, but these changes resulted in no meaningful impact on the news frame. These findings indicate that the dominant narrative is incorporative enough to accommodate “journalistically useful” points without resulting in a fundamental or substantive change in the frames that inform newswork. Thus, the emergence of dissident media monitors to “neutralize” guardian monitors is only one step toward affecting the entire “ideological air” that informs newswork of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues. / text

Serving as the national soothsayer for citizens and political elites alike, the President of the United States looks to and predicts the future. When presidents try to gain influence today, they predict tomorrow. Expectations, or future-oriented statements made by the president, are a prominent attribute of presidential communication. This dissertation engages “future talk” by examining how presidents construct expectation frames as well as how the public reacts to presidential discussions about the future. I answer two main questions in this research. First, how often and under what circumstances do presidents construct expectations? Second, how do expectations affect the citizens who encounter them? I employed a multi-methodological approach to analyze the content and effects of expectation frames. First, I content analyzed a sample of State of the Union addresses and signing statements from the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as a sample of tweets from the White House Twitter feed in the Obama administration. The analytic approach captured patterns of expectation emphasis and de-emphasis within a communication as well as accounted for variation across presidential communications due to external political and communicative factors. Second, I conducted a between-subjects experiment to test the effects of expectation frames on individuals. I examined how the type of expectation frame influences perceptions about the future and the president. This research uncovers that presidents strategically construct expectations and can influence how individuals think about the future. Presidents engage in deliberate actions to target the settings where expectations are framed, the agents responsible for the future, and the policies associated with tomorrow. In turn, citizens attend to how presidents frame the future and are influenced as a result of encountering future frames. The results of this dissertation illuminate critical facets of presidential communicative leadership of public opinion as well as elite influence within government. The president’s prominence in American life should force our attention to how the chief executive divines and shapes the future for citizens and intergovernmental agents. / text

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År 2009 hade dokumentärfilmen Bananas!* premiär. Filmen skildrar rättegången i en långdragen konflikt mellan nicaraguanska bananarbetare och fruktföretaget Dole, där skadliga bekämpningsmedel anses ha gjort bananarbetare sterila. Bananas!* skapade debatt inför premiärvisningen vid Los Angeles filmfestival, då Dole ansåg att filmens innehåll bar på osanning, och ville stoppa filmen. Efter visningen stämde Dole filmens regissör Fredrik Gertten, producenten Margarete Jangård och filmbolaget WG Film. Detta blev starten på en kamp mellan ett företag och ett journalistiskt arbete, och en medial uppståndelse blev till. Den här uppsatsen undersöker hur tidningar i USA och Sverige rapporterade om konflikten kring Bananas!*. Tidningarna Los Angeles Times och Sydsvenskan analyseras för att ta reda på hur olika karaktärer i konflikten framställdes. Breven och den stämningsansökan som Dole skickade, där företaget uttryckte sin misstro gentemot filmen, analyseras även för att ta reda på hur Dole ramade in händelsen och hur detta kan ha påverkat tidningarnas rapportering. Detta med hjälp av teorier som framing, nyhetsvärdering och nyhetsretorik. Resultatet av denna undersökning visar att framställningen av karaktärerna skiljer sig åt i de två tidningarna. I Sydsvenskan är den generella framställningen av Fredrik Gertten positiv och av Dole negativ, medan framställningen av bananarbetarna och advokaten Juan Dominguez blir något positiv. Los Angeles Times framställer Dominguez, och delvis bananarbetarna, på ett negativt sätt, medan Dole och Gertten till stor del blir neutrala i dessa artiklar. Undersökningen visar även att Doles inramning av konflikten kan ha påverkat vad tidningarnas rapportering fokuserade på, där Sydsvenskan fokuserade mer på Doles felaktiga agerande och deras stämningsansökan medan Los Angeles Times rapportering överensstämmer med Doles inramning.

This essay aims to find out how Hillary Clinton is portrayed in news articles dated between October 8th to November 8th 2016 gathered from Fox News and CNN. With the help of qualitative framing analysis the study looks closer on 14 articles from the chosen time period to reveal which frames that are visible in the news material. The study also raises questions about how those frames portray masculinity or femininity and how the results of the study differs from studies done by other researchers. Results reveal that there are three prominent frames visible in the chosen material; a game frame, a scandal frame and a frame about competence and trustworthiness. Hillary Clinton is mostly portrayed as a masculine, competent yet criminal person, and the previous research matches with the findings in some areas that concern scandals and trust and differs in others that concern gender stereotypes.

Problem statement and purpose of the study: The picture and the visual presentation have an increased importance in news media today. Which means that politicians visual frames can have a great impact on the readers and therefore on the outcome of an election. The purpose of this study is to examine the visual framing of the american presidential candidates of the 2016 election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, to see if there is any sign of stereotyping or personalising, and if the candidate’s gender matters. Women and men have been framed differently by the news media in the past. Men has often been portrayed as the normative politician, while women been portrayed as the female politician. Method: This essay is written by a qualitative method and is the result of semiotic analysis of 16 pictures from the swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. Eight of the analyzed pictures show Donald Trump and the other eight show Hillary Clinton. We analyzed the pictures by denotation and connotation. Main result: Our results showed some significant differences in the visual framing of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Trump is portrayed as an more threatening and serious manner while Hillary Clinton’s framing shows a more emotional and encouraging politician. We also found stereotyping in the visual framing, but not so much personalising. The two candidates gender was for the most part clear in the framing. Hillary Clinton’s frames were those of a woman and Donald Trump’s those of a man. There were differences in the two newspapers visual framing, but they were not as clear as the ones between Trump and Clinton.

Prior research suggests that controls can negatively impact the motivation of employees to exert effort and that the detrimental effects of controls depend on control source. That is, controls cause more adverse behavior when employees attribute the source of control implementation to their manager’s decision than when the source of control implementation is beyond their manager’s authority. This study uses experiments to investigate whether the behavioral effects of controls depend not only on control source, but also on control framing, by which managers can frame the control implementation either for monitoring or coordinating purposes. The study also suggests that the interaction of control source and control framing impacts the strength of vertical collective identity, i.e. the shared identity between managers and employees, which in turn explains the differences in employee effort. While this study documents that the interaction of control source and control framing has no effect on vertical collective identity or employee effort, it finds a surprising result: employees respond more positively to the monitoring-framed controls than to the coordinating-framed controls, particularly when the controls are imposed by the manager. This finding suggests that persuasive messages can backfire if the employees are aware of the manager’s potentially self-serving motives behind the control implementation.

Vid sidan av begrepp som miljövänlig, grön och hållbar har ett nytt ord dykt upp i miljödiskursen - klimatsmart.Klimatsmart, eller enbart smart i olika miljörelaterade sammansättningar, används flitigt av gemene man, i media, i debattartiklar och reklamkampanjer. Vad innebär då klimatsmart?Denna uppsats syftar till att i en diskursanalytisk kontext undersöka begreppet klimatsmart, dels ur ett politiskt perspektiv samt i den svenske medborgarens vardag. Medborgaren och dennes vardagliga val är onekligen en stor del av miljö- och klimatfrågan idag. Den svenska miljö- och klimatpolitiken kräver ofta medborgares aktiva deltagande. Allt pekar på att den stora källan till dagens miljöproblem och klimatförändringar ligger i de miljontals val människor gör varje dag, och att det därför krävs att varje enskild människa tar ansvar för sina val och dess konsekvenser, för att vi ska kunna se en förändring. Samtidigt som en stor del av detta ansvar har lagts på den enskilde medborgaren, har politiken fortfarande huvudansvaret, det är politikens ansvar att förse medborgare med de medel som krävs för att möjliggöra och underlätta dessa val.Ett slående inslag i miljö- och klimatpolitiken är den kontrast som finns mellan hur allmänheten ser frågan i allmänna och enkla termer, medan hos beslutsfattare och politiker är frågan mycket mer teknisk och detaljerad. Politiken kan bli legitim och effektiv först när den lyssnar på medborgaren. I studien har e-postserveys med medborgare boende i Karlskoga samt intervjuer med regionala politiker verksamma i Karlskoga kommun eller Örebro län genomförts. Denna empiriska data har analyserats med hjälp av diskurs både som teori och metod samt framing-teorin. Även politiska styrdokument på nationell och internationell nivå har använts som underlag. Studien visar att för medborgaren innebär klimatsmart att i vardagen göra val som i första hand är bra för miljö och klimat, men som även har någon personlig nytta, utifrån varje individs egna förutsättningar, värderingar och intresse.I politiken har klimatsmart en plats i den talade politiska retoriken och då framförallt i regionpolitiken. Ju närmre den enskilde medborgaren politiken rör sig, desto men relevant blir begreppet klimatsmart. Med detta blir det också relevant för politiker att kunna nyttja begreppet till sin och politikens fördel, för att den medborgarinriktade miljö- och klimatpolitiken skall lyckas.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the assessment process in Swedish compulsory school practice, and the changes that occur in relation to the introduction of national school reforms. The fieldwork forming the basis of the thesis was conducted in year five and year six classrooms between 2011-2013, a period during which new national syllabuses with knowledge requirements, grades in year six and extended national tests were introduced. The thesis consists of four articles, the first of which explores how the assessment process is put into practice in a year five classroom and how it is understood by the students and one of their teachers. The fieldwork on which the first article is based was conducted prior to the introduction of the above-mentioned reforms. The second article investigates the assessment process in two different year five classrooms in two schools, after the introduction of the new syllabuses but prior to the introduction of grades in year six and extended national tests. The third article investigates changes in the assessment process in the same two schools. The fieldwork was conducted in year five and year six, in relation to the introduction of grades in year six and extended national tests. The fourth article addresses how changes in the assessment process have affected students’ learner identities. The empirical material was collected during four fieldwork periods in three schools, chiefly through classroom observations, interviews and student essays. The analysis in the thesis is based primarily on Basil Bernstein’s (e.g. 2000) theoretical framework but also on the theoretical concepts of Torrance and Pryor (1998). The study shows that the reforms are exerting a significant influence on the assessment process in the investigated classroom practices. Teachers monitor their students’ performance more closely and students strive to acquaint themselves with what is expected of them. It also appears that the focus is increasingly on students’ performance in relation to the steering documents, that the more regulated practices restrict teachers’ and students’ autonomy and that the assessment process in the two schools investigated in both year five and year six are becoming increasingly similar. Furthermore, the study shows that students tend to pay more attention to their school work, while at the same time experiencing more negative pressure to perform. In the concluding analysis and discussion sections, connections are drawn between prevailing education policy and the reforms, as well as their influence on classroom practice, students and teachers.