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The 2016 presidential election in USA was extraordinary from several point of views and the election was majorly covered by swedish media. The aim of this research was to examine how Swedish newspapers portrayed Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from a gender perspective during the 2016 presidential election. We also wanted to analyse how other common political news frames were used to portray Clinton and Trump.   This is a qualitative framing analysis of 14 strategically selected articles, seven that were published by Aftonbladet and seven by Dagens Nyheter. The results showed tendencies of several gendered stereotypes that are being retained by the frames the newspapers use. Frames such as gendered traits and gendered issue emphases, but also game frames were offered to the reader.   We discovered that Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter offered a more positive opinion of Clinton than of Trump. While Clinton was framed as an experienced, emotional and compassionate candidate, Trump was framed as an inexperienced, insensitive and aggressive candidate. Clinton was framed with gendered issue emphases in both the public and private sphere, while Trump was framed with gendered issue emphases in only the public sphere. Furthermore, game frames showed that the newspapers had a tendency of polarizing and personifying the candidates.

Global research shows that media owners tend to influence the editorial direction of their newspapers. Such influence generally tends to be in line with the media owner’s economic and / or political interests. Naturally, this is a challenge because media is regarded as the fourth estate and is supposed to be an objective yet effective channel for the citizenry to make informed decisions about their world. The study seeks to find out if the owners of four daily newspapers in South Africa, based on their political proximity; may have influenced their newspapers to be biased in favour or against any of the three biggest political parties contesting the 2016 Local Government Elections. This study is an exploratory and descriptive content analysis based on an Agenda Setting theoretic framework – supported by framing analysis and game framing. Findings reveal the correlation between the media owner’s interests and the biased reporting within their respective newspaper. This suggests that although media may not be directly or explicitly forced to adopt a specific ideology, it can be argued that political relations with media owners can influence editorial decisions. Therefore, it can be inferred that media owners of The New Age, The Citizen and The Star influenced editorial content of their newspapers during the 2016 local government elections. Given the findings of this study and the elections scheduled for 2019 in South Africa, it is important for more political communication studies to be conducted in order to establish guidelines for unbiased news reporting across all media – including newspapers. Alternatively, to compel media owners to declare their bias towards and against specific political parties in each news content, upfront. Particularly important during election period, is the need for each media (including newspapers) to have an independent editor – potentially one from the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to ensure that each piece of content produced is validated as bias or impartial. / Communication Science / M.A. (Communication Science)