Identitet mellan raderna : –       En studie om hur amerikanska tidningar beskriver den nationella identiteten i USA

Sammanfattning: Under the latest presidential election in the USA debates of the national identity was one of the central topics, which have made the polarization between the parties wider. Today we know that people choose the media that sympathies with their opinion and turn from the media that challenge their political believes. By studying newspapers one can examine what they say about national identity and membership, which in turn shows which groups are represented in society. By using membership as a theory, the study gives a new theoretical approach and see if membership theory can describe how the American identity is described in newspapers. The study will analyze six American newspapers and ten articles per paper, in total of 60 articles. The method is describing analysis of ideas, which will be used to clarify and analyze how the newspapers are describing membership. All the newspapers are analyzed separately and, in the end, a comparative analysis between the papers is made. There are three major conclusions to been drawn. The first one shows a divided identity in USA, but all the papers have the same solution, it is the governments task to fix and restore the national identity. The second conclusion shows how divided the newspapers are from their ideological undertone from different points of views of membership. The third conclusion shows that all newspapers describe membership in different ways.