Burning Hijabs and Breaking Frames : A qualitative content analysis on Swedish daily newspapers framing of the Iranian protest

Sammanfattning: For studies of social movements, media is the most crucial aspect when it comes to understanding the movement. And for a civil society choosing to protest under an authoritarian regime, the media is more than crucial, it is key. Based on the social media attention the protests in Iran after Mahsa Aminis death received, this study intends to see how the Swedish daily newspapers SvD and DN framed the protest, focusing on message, political actors and local voices- the key aspects to include when framing a protest. The empirical data for this study consists of articles published between September 16, 2022 and November 16, 2022, making it up to 124 articles to examine. By using a coding scheme for the content analysis, it is based on previous studies regarding the protest paradigm, which is a theory applied to understand the focus on spectacle in media's portrayal of protests. This study developed two coding schemes where the first one is for the aim of identifying the overall portrayal and the second intends to identify frames that further contribute to the constructions of the political actors. Along with the content analysis, framing theory and the protest paradigm, the study adopts the social constructivist view of language to be able to understand the role of news in shaping public perceptions. Analyzing news coverage through this perspective allowed this study to gain a deeper understanding of how knowledge is constructed and how it shapes our understanding of the world. Lastly, by applying discourse analysis the study was able to examine the language within the frames and how it was used to construct reality and political actors in different ways. It was helpful in finding out the influence of the articles in creating as well as changing political and societal discourse around the issue. The study revealed a result that challenged the protest paradigm as well as confirming some results in previous research. Violence frames were in previous literature the main frames, which it was in this study too, however, in this study the violence frames did not get interpreted as in the protest paradigm theory since protest under authoritarian regimes needed another analytical eye focusing more on the context and the way in which the violence was directed towards.