Konsten att gestalta kriminalitet - En diskursanalys av svensk medias gestaltning av organiserad brottslighet i Malmö

Sammanfattning: On the 26th of August 2019 Karolin Hakim was executed. Newspapers quickly established that she fell victim to the organized crime in Malmö. Later the same year, a fifteen-year-old boy died in a shooting outside a restaurant in the same city. These events contributed to the launching of multiple operations within the Swedish police department. The situation in Malmö led to significant news coverage, focusing on the organized crime and its consequences. This paper examines how Swedish newspapers frame organized crime in Malmö. This, by using framing theory and van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis on twelve news articles from the newspapers Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet. The result of the analysis indicates that the organized crime violence is framed as alarming and recurring. The newspapers construct the organized crime victims as ‘normal’ and ‘young’ and perpetrators as ‘reckless’ and ‘careless’, thus presenting the two groups as homogenic. Furthermore, they only let certain actors, such as politicians and the police, comment on the situation and its problem solving. By showing how news media frames the organized crime as alarming and simplifying its actors and their acting, this paper demonstrates how the media frames organized crime in Malmö as well as chooses to highlight certain problem definitions and solutions.