This essay evaluates social constructivist theory by analyzing how it brings understanding to an empirical case. The case under study is the Danish Muhammad Cartoon Controversy of 2005-2006, and by using a constructivist conceptualization of identities and norms this essay attempts to demonstrate how constructivism helps in understanding the event where rationalist theories fall short. This essay concludes that these two concepts do further understanding of various social elements that contributed to the explosiveness of the conflict but that there is a difficulty in establishing causality and outlining in detail how they do so.

De radikala högerpopulistiska partierna Sverigedemokraterna och Dansk Folkeparti har båda etablerat sig i Sveriges respektive Danmarks partisystem. Då studier av populism och populistiska aktörer i relation till journalistik ur ett medievetenskapligt perspektiv är få, är denna studies syfte att studera och diskutera relationen mellan journalistik och radikala högerpopulistiska aktörer. Detta för att möjliggöra en diskussion kring vilken roll denna relation spelar för mediers journalistiska innehåll och framställning av politiska aktörer. Uppsatsens utgångspunkt tar sitt uttryck från tidigare forskning av radikala högerpopulistiska aktörer och deras framväxt tillsammans med teoretiska ansatser om mediers politiska rapportering. Genom en kvantitativ innehållsanalys av ledande svenska och danska dags- och kvällstidningar kommer slutsatser kring beroenderelationen mellan medier och radikala högerpopulistiska aktörer dras och problematiseras.

The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two newspapers in a liberal information context. Message propagation in a restrictive information environment was analyzed using the English daily Kuwait Times from the Middle East; the liberal information environment of the US was analyzed using two major dailies, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study also concurrently identifies and elaborates on the themes and frames through which discourse was presented exposing the cultural ideologies and premises they represent. The topic was approached with an interdisciplinary position with the support and applicability testing of Chatman's insider-outsider theory within information science and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory and Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model based in the area of mass communication. The study has also presented a new model of information censorship - circle of information censorship, emphasizing conceptual issues that influence the selection and censorship of information.