The purpose of this study is to investigate how Swedish newspapers chose to portray the mass-suicide of the new religious movement Heaven’s Gate in 1997. The study aims to gain insight into how the Swedish mass-media portrayed the religious leader Marshall Applewhites' actions, and the rest of the members and discuss what patterns of the reporting can be related to other depictions of “sects” investigated in previous research. Laycock's theory of how the media portrays new religious movements is used to categorize the use of Heaven's Gate in the articles. By searching the Swedish Royal library’s (KB) newspaper database, 496 articles are found that mention “Heaven’s Gate* and 99 articles that mention Applewhite*. Of these, 89 are considered relevant articles that are included in the source material. The material will be analyzed using a qualitative text analytical method. With the help of previous research about how new religious movements are portrayed in the media, a context is established which is also linked back to strengthen the result and is discussed in the final discussion of the study. The results indicate that all concepts in Laycock's theory appear in the media portrayal of Heaven's Gate. Moreover, most of the responsibility for the suicides is attributed to Applewhite in the source material. Finally, a couple of concluding reflections on the content are presented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-61548 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Ronneland, Max |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation |
| 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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