Mord som mord? : En undersökning av Aftonbladets och Svenska Dagbladets rapportering av mordfall

Sammanfattning: This study aims to investigate how female and male murder victims are represented in two swedish newspapers Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet. By analyzing articles about the murders of Lisa Holm, Ida Johnsson, Ahmed Obaid and Rami Amin this study seeks to understand how they differ depending on the gender of the victim. To answer this, three research questions have been included; 1) How is the murder victim represented depending on if it’s a man or a woman? 2) Which other aspects than the murder victim is given a focus in the articles and what realities is formed from it? 3) ​Are there any differences between the morning newspaper and the evening newspaper, if so, which? The theoretical framework that was used to answer these three questions are social constructivism, Stuart Halls encoding/decoding and representation, gender theory, agenda theory and attribute agenda, priming and framing. The material consists of articles from the two newspapers, and the chosen methods are both a quantitative and qualitative textual analysis. The results shows that the male murder victims are described by their future plans and careers in a way that the female victims were not. There were two other aspects which were given a focus in the articles, the location and the murderer. ​The location of the murders of Ahmed Obaid and Rami Amin, which in both cases were Malmö, was described as a dangerous place with a lot of criminal acts. Since none of the victims were involved in any criminal activity they were represented as innocent, who fell victims to the city. In the case of Ida Johansson, the exact location of the murder, a jogging track, was given focus. Since a jogging track normally is not seen as a dangerous place the murder of Ida was represented as an unfortunate case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murderer was only known in the two cases with the female victims, and were given almost as much focus in the articles as the victims. The main differences between the two newspapers were that Aftonbladet wrote more articles about the cases and also had a tendency to use more media dramaturgy than Svenska Dagbladet.