Gräsligt beteende - En kvalitativ studie om hur media presenterar cannabis

Sammanfattning: The aim of our study was to investigate the image the Swedish media present of cannabis and in particular hasch. We gathered all articles published during one month in the year 2002 and in 2012 in three major newspapers in Sweden. The newspapers examined where Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet and Metro. Through a social constructive perspective and discourse analysis as method we divided the content in the articles into about 30 various categories such as youths, harms, criminalization, gender, age and attitude towards cannabis. Some of the categories weren’t actualized and instead of analyzing them, we had to reflect over why they weren’t mentioned. Our major findings in our analysis was that media gives a different angle on the content of categories than the reality when we compared the articles with statistics and previous research findings. Media implies that the prev-alence of cannabis among youths is larger than it is in the reality. The newspaper articles also tend to stress that cannabis is very dangerous and can be a gate-way drug to heavier narcotics, something which scientists do not agree about. This way of exposing cannabis in media can be affected by the heavily regulated politics of narcotics in the Swedish society. The side effects of the atrocity propaganda that media tends to feature can be that youths loses their confidence in the policy of the government or the media forum it is expressed in, when the youths are ex-posed to other opinions through for example music, friends, social media or the internet.