SD in i värmen : en diskursanalytisk studie av hur Sverigedemokraterna skildrades i svensk rikspress 2014-2016

Sammanfattning: The aim of our study was to analyze how Sweden’s four national daily newspapers – Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet – portrayed the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats from May 2014 to October 2016. There are a number of reasons why it is highly relevant to study the Sweden Democrats. Firstly, their rise from relative obscurity to becoming the country’s third largest party over the last decade has transformed Sweden’s political landscape. The party’s emergence is also part of a much larger narrative, with the growth of far-right populist parties and nationalist forces – from Dansk Folkeparti and Fremskrittspartiet in neighboring Denmark and Norway to the election of Donald Trump in USA – across the west, at the same time as the dramatic refugee situation in Europe has generated an explosive debate on immigration across the continent. In the first step of our analysis we made a quantitative analysis of 210 articles, using a code schemata to highlight patterns in the reporting. These articles were collected from three separate sample periods. In the next step, we made in-depth qualitative analyses on twelve articles which were representative of the overriding structures we could discern from original material. Throughout our analyses we used discourse analysis as our theoretical framework. Our analysis shows that from May 2014 to October 2016, the national press in Sweden has increasingly portrayed the Sweden Democrats as a conventional political party, slowly replacing the framing of the party as a dangerous or unreliable force. As part of this trend, the newspaper reports also shows a softening of the relationship between the Sweden Democrats and the other parliamentary parties. However, the portrayal of the party as an outcast in the country’s political field has by no means been eradicated, and a continued development in the same direction is no foregone conclusion. With this in mind and parliamentary elections coming up in 2018, our hope is that this study will be one of many investigating the relationship between the Sweden Democrats and the country’s media the coming years.