Televised news media serves as many people's main source of information about world events and groups of people that they themselves may not interact with. In recent times, the idea of systematic discrimination of political, ethnic and/or religious groups has become a particularly hot topic, not only in Sweden, but in many other countries in Europe and North America as well. This study aims to investigate and shed light upon how Swedish television news media portray Muslims, as a step towards discerning whether an anti-Muslim or discriminating discourse is being employed by these news broadcasters. The research questions that guided this study were formulated as thus: “How are Muslims portrayed in Swedish television news?” “Who are designated as being 'Muslim' by the broadcasters?” and “Can any recurring trends or themes be found in Swedish news media regarding the portrayal of Muslims?” To answer these questions, a random selection of television news broadcasts was collected from two of the major news programs in Sweden; the 7 pm showing of TV4-nyheterna and the 10 pm showing of SVT 1's Rapport. The segments which were deemed relevant to the study were then subjected to an analysis of narrative features and recurring themes in order to answer the research questions. This study found that the news broadcasters showed a tendency to avoid highlighting the participants' religious identity, except for when it came to the subject of religious extremism and terrorism. Whenever a segment featured groups that were classified as radical, militant Islamists, such as ISIS or Boko Haram, their religious affiliations as Muslims were highlighted, whereas every other participant in the segments were referred to by national or ethnic classifications, such as “Iraqi” or “Yazidi”. Furthermore, only the newscasters themselves were reserved the privilege of designating actors as Muslim or Kurd etc., not the participants in question. While these findings give interesting insights into how Swedish media chooses to employ religious denominations in their news narratives, there still remains much to investigate, as regards to why the media portrayal of Islam and Muslims functions the way it does. Further research on the underlying factors behind the construction of these narrative tendencies, as well as studies that encompass a larger data selection, are required. Furthermore, future studies on how these new media messages contribute to a joint societal narrative and world perception could prove to be very illuminating and a good complement to the research field.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-323598 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Peterzén, Viktor |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Religionssociologi |
| 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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