Several discussions rose in western media when Swedish high-jumper Emma Green Tregaro competed with her nails painted in the colors of the rainbow during the athletic world championship in Moscow, in August 2013. This was meant to show her support for the gay movement, but was viewed as a protest against the new Russian law which forbids gay propaganda. Western media critizised Russian media for failing to report the incident to their readers and that is where we got interested in making this research. We got the idea of comparing a Swedish newspaper with a Russian one, to observe differences in how they chose to report the event. Due to lack of knowledge of the Russian language and the kyrillic alphabet we had to turn to an English-speaking newspaper based in Russia: The Moscow Times. We compared the Moscow Times with the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, to see their differences in terms of: How they chose to cover the event, from a gender perspective; what structures of power can be found, how Emma Green Tregaro and Yelena Isinbayeva are portrayed and what meaning the protest is given by the narrators. We achieved our results through narrative analysis, a qualitative method. We applied theories such as gender theory and media logic in order to obtain answers to our questions. We came to the conclusion that there are great differences in how much attention the protest achieved in the two newspapers. From the Swedish perspective, more focus were put on Emma Green Tregaro where she is a brave messenger of love, while in the Russian, more emphasis lays on Yelena Isinbayeva as a defender of the Russian stance. While Dagens Nyheter has put resources into sending journalists to Moscow, The Moscow Times has used a lot of material from news bureaus such as Reuters and The Associated Press instead of covering the event themselves. Another interesting fact is that the institutions presented in the news flow such as the IAAF, IOC and the Swedish Sports Confederation are only represented by men, and through the power structural dimension of gender theory we can see tendencies of control or influence over the female sports profiles’ actions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-33361 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Börnkrantz, Christina, Säll, Madeleine |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ), Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ) |
| 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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