“(Wo)man, Life, Freedom” : en flermetodsstudie om representationen och gestaltningen av nyhetskällor i Al Arabiya och Al Jazeera under protesterna i Iran 2022 & 2023

Sammanfattning: This essay examines articles published on the English editorial websites of Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera that discuss the protests that have taken place in Iran following the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini. The study is based on the framing theory, the gender theory, and the theory on “primary definers”. The purpose of the essay is to present which people get their voices heard in the media's coverage of topics that involve womens’ rights. The essay also aims to describe how these people are portrayed in connection to the protests. The essay applies a multi-method study where a quantitative method has been utilized in order to show the frequency of different types of human sources and their statements. The quantitative section was accomplished by using the statistics program SPSS, in which we coded our chosen categories: protesters, observers, and people of power. A qualitative thematic analysis was applied to show the different ways that protesters were portrayed in the news articles about the protests. The quantitative analysis revealed that 21,8 percent of the sources that get their voices heard are women. The most remarkable results show that out of 199 articles, statements by female protesters were included in six percent of these, while statements by male protesters were included in less than three percent of the articles. Statements by females in power were seen in three percent of the articles, and statements by males in power were included in 51,8 percent of them. The qualitative analysis reveals that the news channels’ portrayal of the female protesters was gender-stereotypical, since the women, for instance, were depicted as powerless victims, mothers, and wives. However, based on their own statements, the women were portrayed as strong and resilient. When Iranian people of power spoke about the protests, the protesters were portrayed as criminals and as a threat to national security. The protesters were, however, celebrated by certain people of power outside of Iran. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative methods show that there is a lack of female protesters as sources in the news coverage of protests for women’s rights. Instead, males in power are the most used sources and can therefore construct a particular image of the protesters through the portrayals that are published in the media.