This study investigates the news media coverage in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter, the two major newspapers in Sweden, surrounding narcotics. We investigate the relationship between the hegemony in Swedish drug-policy and news reporting, to examine whether a larger cultural hegemony can be said to exist. The existence of a larger cultural hegemony depends upon social institutions, such as news media, reproducing the values of a political hegemony. We have chosen a discourse-theoretical framework, where hegemony, ideology and discourse are central concepts. Our theoretical framework also includes broader concepts and theories from the field of journalism studies, such as agenda setting and news values. The study contains both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis, to examine different aspects of news coverage of narcotics. Our methodological approach is based on Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) and is largely operationalized using Carvalho’s (2008) methodological template, with analytical tools borrowed form Boréus (2005), Cohen (2002) and Christie & Bruun (1985). Our analysis shows that news coverage of narcotics in the second half of 2020 in Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter is heavily dominated by crime-reporting, where law enforcement agents and narratives are given great amounts of framing power, which in turn reproduces the hegemonic values of Swedish drug policy, which promotes a juridical discourse in relation to drug-related problems. Previous research has found that Swedish drug policy is largely influenced by moral values rather than scientific research, which reflects our study’s findings of a higher prevalence of a moral discourse over a medical discourse. Lastly, there is an almost total absence of a recreational discourse in our material. These findings demonstrate how the hegemonic values of Swedish drug policy are reflected in the news media, which could point to the existence of a larger cultural hegemony in relation to narcotics in Sweden. However, the qualitative analysis also highlights examples where a high degree of interdiscursivity can be distinguished, which could point to a challenging of hegemonic values in Swedish drug policies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-48252 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Thorné, Oliver, Thyrberg, Victor |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Journalistik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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