<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.

Previous research demonstrated the phenomenon of moral panics on “dangerous” games mostly from Western perspectives, regarding media violence and deviant behaviour. With the development of media technology, the term “media panic” has evolved from moral panic, representing the debates and fearful emotion from the public when a new media technology has been created. Digital games as a form of media technology have been developed to be widely played on various platforms in recent decades, which have not only brought concerns to the Western but also to Chinese society. The present study will introduce media panic on digital games in China by analyzing news reports from three Chinese mainstream news media: People’s Daily, Xinhua Daily Telegraph and Wen Wei Po (Shanghai). Content analysis will be adopted as the main method to process the news data (N = 445) which are collected from five periods between 2002 and 2020 (2002-2004, 2007-2009, 2012-2014, 2017-2019, 2020). Different phases and features of the panic will be analyzed through the classical moral panic theories of Cohen, Goode and Ben-Yehuda, and the media panic theory of Drotner. Topics of game addiction, Internet cafes, policies on the game industry, cultural innovation, development of esports will be explored when investigating the changing media attitudes toward digital games in the Chinese context.