Ekot av normerna : En diskursanalytisk studie av hur kön konstrueras i Dagens Ekos nyhetssändningar

Sammanfattning: Sweden’s most trusted news distributor, Sveriges Radio (Swedish Public Service radio broadcaster), has high ambitions with the journalism it broadcasts – especially when it comes to gender equality and diversity. This thesis examines how gender is constructed in Dagens Eko (Today’s Echo) to find if and how power structures are expressed language-wise. Queer theory is used to look at how gender is constructed and how one can look at, and question, gender and gender hierarchies. Intersectionality is used to find how different power structures work together, combined with theories about how journalism constructs truth. At the same time the thesis is also evaluating different choices of theories and methods, to find strengths and weaknesses for future research purposes.  The analysis is based on materials from domestic news segments from Dagens Eko, consisting of one week’s broadcasts in January 2015. Critical linguistics is used as a method, with emphasis on Halliday’s functional grammar, as a part of Fairclough’s three-layer model. Through the eye of critical discourse analysis, this study shows that gender is constructed through language, more specifically via categorization and stereotyping. The thesis conducts that the use of so called cases, people who are in the news segments to give a more human perspective on the subject, is problematic because this is as also a way of efficiently constructing stereotypes. The thesis also concludes that while using statistics to present more equal representation in the news, this is not enough.