<p>The aim of this thesis has been to examine how the risk for the swine flu was represented in the Swedish Radio news broadcast Ekot 16.45 during different phases of the pandemic in 2009. We wanted to study how the risk was described in different discourses and periods? Were the participants in the reporting calming or warning the listeners in relations to different aspects of the swine flu? What consequences for the community were reported in the broadcasting?</p><p>To find the answers to our questions, we analysed 13 features about the swine flu broadcasted in Ekot’s main news broadcast Ekot 16.45. We used critical discourse analysis inspired by Norman Fairclough.</p><p>We identified four types of discourses in our text, a journalistic discourse, a medical discourse, a nationalistic discourse and an authority discourse. The main discourse was the medical one. We also discovered power relations in each discourse but also between them.</p><p>We noticed that the media transmitted the information from the authorities like a megaphone, rather than handling it in their traditionally critical way. In addition most people interviewed were representatives from the authorities and not ordinary people, manifesting the above mentioned authoritative perspective/discourse and leading to an absence of descriptions on effects at an everyday level. We also observed that the risk was talked about in various ways depending on if the feature belonged to the warning or acute phase of the pandemic. In the way the features were presented, it was clear that the presentations of the swine flu also had effects on the community, the healthcare and the whole nation as if preparing for an outbreak.</p>

This Diploma thesis deals with some aspects of four chosen Czech daily newspapers referring about the outbreak and early development of events connected with one of the latest significant global crisis - the swine flu, which had broken out in 2009. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with some characteristics of crisis and basic concepts, which might be associated with their media coverage. In the practical part, it deals with the way, how the Czech dailies covered first two weeks of spreading of the disease. At the beginning, the thesis introduces a quantitative profile of the analyzed sample and shows both physical and verbal range of it. The second part is focused on the main topics, which were chosen by all daily newspapers to refer about the swine flu. Those, which did not make it to the main thematic line presented before, are also shortly mentioned in the chapter. In the third part, the thesis follows the main motives appearing in the images that accompanied the news with the chosen topic and also discovers how the disease was "objectified". Finally, language analysis discovering some specific subjective language characteristics referring to a potential personal opinion included by individual authors, or the way how the authors dealt with the coverage of the potential future development...