Color-Blindness in Swedish Media? : A Comparative Study of Media's Portrayal of Syrian and Ukrainian Refugees

Sammanfattning: A comparative study on how Swedish media portrayed Syrian refugees in 2015 compared to how the same media portrayed Ukrainian refugees in 2022. This paper presents a thematic analysis of seventynine newspaper articles published in 2015 and 2022 by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. The comparison was made to see if the chosen articles portrayed these different groups of refugees differently, and I later engage in a discussion based on the results of the analysis. The thematic analysis showed a difference between the cases in how different themes manifested, as well as what themes were given more space in each case. The discussion later provides a set of different alternative explanations on why these differences exist – engaging with different theories and explanations as to why these cases had such a different impact on and given different portrayals by the Swedish media.