EU i nyheterna : En diskursanalys om EU och EU:s anseende i det svenska medieutbudet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this essay is to analyze the EU discourse in the Swedish media. The questions that the analysis seeks to answer are; what image of EU is portrayed in the Swedish media? To which degree does the EU discourse fulfill media’s “news values”? And what are the potential effects of the discourse on EU’s reputation? After several demarcations, I chose 8 articles form Sweden’s four largest newspapers to base the analysis on.     The theoretical and methodical structure behind this analysis is the theories and practices of Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. Added to the theoretical structure are also theories about reputation and theories about news values. The method used in the analysis is a modified version of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. The modifications are modified to suit the questions at issues, at the text dimension of Fairclough’s model the modification are inspired by Fowler’s critical linguistics. The results from the analysis shows EU is portrayed in several ways, partly as “bully” using per-pressure to get its way and partly as a hero that comes and cleans up the European financial mess. In many of the articles EU only plays a supporting role, and rather then being portrayed as part of our political system EU is portrayed as a guiding norm that we should measure up to.   The conclusion is that there is a lack of interest for EU in the Swedish media. News about EU struggle to fulfill two important new values; simplification and human interest. EU is a complex faceless bureaucratic institution with a lack of transparency. Also because of its complex nature it’s very difficult to understand the ongoing work inside EU. The potential effects to EU´s reputation due to medias lack of interest, is that EU becomes vague and unclear. The Swedish media legitimizes the Swedish peoples lack of interest in EU and that leads to a continuing lack of knowledge.