Gestaltningen av det spansk–amerikanska kriget 1898 : En kvalitativ studie av den svenska pressdiskussionen kring det spansk–amerikanska kriget 1898

Sammanfattning: The American press has been given a significant amount of attention regarding their role in enabling the Spanish–American war. Even though there is a debate regarding how much the so called yellow press contributed to the causes of war, a significant amount of research points to how the American press was filled with speculations and propaganda which certainly added fuel to the fire. The press played an important part in shaping the opinion of the American and Spanish public regarding the war and US– Spanish diplomatic relations. Most of the studies have been about the American and the Spanish press. A study of the Swedish newspapers reports about the war contributes to military history as it can highlight how a neutral European state regarded the war. It also gives a better understanding of how the press in Sweden during the 1890s operated, in a time when it was still taking its modern shape. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to cover what the Swedish press wrote about the Spanish–American war and how they framed it. To better understand how the newspapers wrote about the war I used the so-called Framing theory as a tool to dissect the coverage of the war. I analyzed the news coverage by using a qualitative text analysis and found that the Swedish newspapers framed the war as an American military success that came with a heavy price as their occupation of the former Spanish colonies raised questions regarding international law and most importantly, morality. The conclusion of the study shows that Spain’s defeat was attributed to the fact that Spain was faltering, not just in terms of their great power status, according to the Swedish newspapers the whole of Spanish society had been decaying since the 16th century. The Swedish newspapers framed the Spanish defeat with sympathetic comments served together with some patronizing undertones.