Media For President : En studie om svensk kvällspress gestaltning av de tre största partierna efter valet år 2014 

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the Swedish tabloids portray three of Sweden’s parliamentary parties - The Swedish Moderate Party, The Social Democrat Party and The Swedish Democrat Party. By distinguishing if the media framing of the political parties follows the political logic or the media logic, a greater understanding and awareness of the relation between citizens’ trust of political parties and the media, can be reached. The study is based on a quantitative content analysis of 610 published articles in the two largest Swedish tabloids - Aftonbladet and Expressen. The study is based on a theoretical framework that includes mediation, the medialization theory, the agenda setting theory and the framing theory. The result indicates that media logic is most frequently used in the portrayal of the Swedish parlamentary parties in the Swedish tabloids. This study shows that media logic is applied in 77 % of the articles, compared to political logic that is applied in 21 %, of the 610 articles gathered during the research process of this thesis. The results show no significant differences between the tabloids, however the framing of the three political parties differ. The Swedish Democrat party is portrayed more often in a scandalous perspective than the other two parties, and more rarely through issue framing. By applying the theory of Strömbäck (2103b), the result of this study indicates that the tabloids framing should affect the citizens’ political opinions and trust