They call it the herd : Gestaltningen av Sveriges coronahantering i kommersiella och statliga medier

Sammanfattning: Examining how different media news outlets frame the same situation is an important step towards understanding how the world’s media systems behave. This study examines how four influential news media outlets, belonging to different media systems, have framed Sweden's management of the Covid-19 pandemic during two time-periods when the Covid-19 virus surged. These two media systems are state owned news outlets, consisting of RT (previously Russia Today) and Xinhua, and commercial news outlets, through BBC News and the New York Times.ThestudyusesadeductiveFramingTheorymethod,asdefinedbySemetkoand Valkenburg (2000), to understand how the framing of this case differs between the two media systems. Beyond Framing Theory, the theoretical framework is extended by including the Propaganda Model (Durham and Kellner 2012; Fuchs 2018) and Nation Branding (Potter 2009), to further understand the contextual forces that influence the news outlets. The results of the study determines that there are differences in the use of framing between the two media systems as well as where they stem from. This implies that the context in which the outlet finds itself impacts the framing of the produced articles. Overall, Attribution of Responsibility proved to be the most common frame, followed by Conflict framing. The first one wasmostcommoninthestateownedoutlets,whereasConflictwasmostcommonforthe commercial news outlets.