Ett mål eller ett människoöde – vad rapporteras det om? : en innehållsanalys av svenska mediers rapportering från den första veckan av herrarnas fotbolls-VM i Ryssland 2018 och i Qatar 2022

Sammanfattning: This essay examines how Swedish newspapers portrayed the men's football world cup. The foundation of the study is set by researchers Lawrence Wenner & Andrew Billings and their findings that critical media coverage on sporting events is reported before it starts. The media's focus then often shifts to mainly concerning sport coverage once the event has started. The aim of this study is to, with this previous research serving as a hypothesis, investigate how the World Cup in Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 is framed in Swedish newspapers. This in order to see whether critical reporting about the event is included or not. The method used in this essay is to quantitatively analyze 120 articles from the media archive Retriever. 16 of these articles are then analyzed qualitatively. The theoretical outline for the quantitative research is the agenda setting theory to detect what is being brought up in the articles. For the qualitative part, framing theory is used to analyze how the event is portrayed. The result for Russia 2018 was that the main theme in 42 out of 60 articles was “sports” and the most common secondary theme was “critics” regarding opinions on solely sporting matters. Not taking opportunities to highlight controversial issues about the event. Only three articles during Russia 2018 had a main theme on questions about politics and human rights issues. Here the critical aspects were only highlighted to a certain extent rather than being dealt with thoroughly by the journalists. In Qatar 2022, 14 out of 60 articles reported on LGBTQ-rights, migrant workers and women rights. The most common secondary theme was “taking a stand” in reference to human rights issues. The third most common main theme was “Iran”, as the ongoing protest for women's rights in the country was frequently highlighted. Overall, during the 2022 World Cup, “sports” was the main theme in 25 out of 60 articles while “human rights”, “Iran” and “politics” together made up 24 articles. Portrayed as a far more essential and fundamental part to the readers, the critical concept played a much bigger part in 2022 than in 2018.