<p><p>This survey's main purpose is to highlight how the two Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter writes and describes four different school shootings. We wanted to find out if there is a general pattern of how school shootings are reported by the media. Two of the shootings occured in USA, Columbine and Virginia Tech, and two in Finland, Kauhajoki and Jokela. The analysis aims at three areas: the whole event, the perpetrator and the victim.</p><p> </p><p>We have used a qualitative content analysis with a semiotic model to examine the articles in the survey. The theories in the study is based upon views on social constructionism, media logic, stereotypization, representation, morale panic/media panic and media events. With the foundation of our chosen theories we have seen a certain amount of articles that is slightly perfunctory and you can tell a template have been layed upon many articles.</p><p> </p><p>One of our conclusions from our survey is that Aftonbladet is a more frequent user of indecent and powerful metaphores and metonymies than Dagens Nyheter. For example is the term bloodbath used a couple of times by Aftonbladet but not by Dagens Nyheter. We have also found out that the perpetrator is generally described as a stereotype when his bad qualities are strenghten and his good qualities are ironed out.</p></p>

This survey's main purpose is to highlight how the two Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter writes and describes four different school shootings. We wanted to find out if there is a general pattern of how school shootings are reported by the media. Two of the shootings occured in USA, Columbine and Virginia Tech, and two in Finland, Kauhajoki and Jokela. The analysis aims at three areas: the whole event, the perpetrator and the victim.   We have used a qualitative content analysis with a semiotic model to examine the articles in the survey. The theories in the study is based upon views on social constructionism, media logic, stereotypization, representation, morale panic/media panic and media events. With the foundation of our chosen theories we have seen a certain amount of articles that is slightly perfunctory and you can tell a template have been layed upon many articles.   One of our conclusions from our survey is that Aftonbladet is a more frequent user of indecent and powerful metaphores and metonymies than Dagens Nyheter. For example is the term bloodbath used a couple of times by Aftonbladet but not by Dagens Nyheter. We have also found out that the perpetrator is generally described as a stereotype when his bad qualities are strenghten and his good qualities are ironed out.