”Det svenska tillståndet” : en kvalitativ publikstudie om hur norska och danska nyhetskonsumenter uppfattar Sverige

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a qualitative interview study about Norwegian and Danish news consumer's views and perceptions about Sweden. The interviews have been conducted in Oslo, Norway and Copenhagen, Denmark, where the aim was to gain understanding about how the representation of Sweden, throughout Norwegian and Danish news media, affects the interviewee's image of Sweden. One of the studie's more significant findings is that several of the informants used the same concept, ”det svenska tillståndet” directly translated into ”the Swedish condition”. This term has been a part of a political discourse mainly driven by conservative parties in both Norway and Denmark to negatively describe integration-related issues in Sweden. Our study shows that the interviewees have adopted this term as a part of their description of Sweden to summarize the overall unfavorable and chaotic picture of Sweden as represented by the news media in Norway and Denmark. Through the perspective of Stuart Hall’s theories regarding how we represent ”others”, people and places that differs from ”ourselves”, the study discusses how Danish and Norwegian news media have created structures that allows them to represent Norway and Denmark in a more superior way in relation to the more submissive Swedish news reports. Furthermore, the thesis also states that there is a stigmatized conception that Sweden, primarily Swedish suburbs and the city of Malmö, are both troubled and dangerous due to problems caused by immigrants.