Motivation: The aim of this study has been to conduct a comparative study concerning how race, ethnicity and class is represented in American contrary to Swedish daily press and from there on to explore and explain similarities and differences that have been found in the material. Problem statement: • How is race, ethnicity and class represented in American contrary Swedish daily press? • What are the similarities and differences between the countries’ daily news flow? • What causes the similiarities and differences to achieve their current form? Material: The material which has been the subject of this study consists of eight articles – four American articles (USA Today) and four Swedish articles (Dagens Nyheter). The material has been elected to meet certain criterias and mainly discusses the effects the health care reform will have on the American population. Approach: The material has been approached by using theories concerned with race, ethnicity, class and framing. The method used to analyze the material was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Results: The results shows significant similarities, although mainly differences, between the countries’ daily news flow. The working class is offered limited space in American as well as Swedish newspaper reporting. Class is used as a tool to categorize the figurants in the material and to give them certain authority. The authority given is demonstrated by the allowance of drawing conclusions, something which is restriced to the capitalist class and upper middle class. The occurence of race and ethnicity differs and is only perceivable in Swedish media. The American articles appear more detailed in describing pros and cons with the health care reform while the Swedish articles mainly describe the negative effects of the current health care system. Conclusion: Swedish press invokes the ethnicity concept in correlation with non-whites. The race concept is invoked in correlation with the white race’s raceless power. The reason could be that ethnicity is not rated as rasism and has retrieved a positive affirmative, although it does reinforce the concept of portraying only non-whites as poor. It has been found unlikely that American press does not correlate with neither race nor ethnicity because they simply have not interviewed non-white people. The similarities are thought to be a result of Western similarities and differences are results of political and cultural national differences.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-57927 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Rogell, Yvonne, Säll, Jessica S. |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för journalistik, medier och kommunikation (JMK), Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för journalistik, medier och kommunikation (JMK) |
| 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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