Från ettor och nollor till ett språk svenskarna kan förstå En kvantitativ studie om hur IT-läckan på Transportstyrelsen rapporterades i svensk dagspress

Abstract

Purpose Under the year of 2017 could everybody follow the news about the Swedish government’s outsourcing of Transportstyrelsen’s IT operations. Somewhere the procurement had gone wrong and confidential information had been compromised. But when it comes to news covering IT the main substance tend to be forgotten and in this case the politics got a big coverage instead. The question raised, how does the news media reporting looks like when it comes to IT news. Is the topic really about IT or do they tend to be about something else? Methods and materials To find the answer we made a quantitative content analysis. In the analysis we examined the four biggest daily press in Sweden: Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Svenska Dagbladet. We studied what they had published about Transportstyrelsen under its first month of the covering, from 7 July. Our material consisted by the newspaper news articles that were published on paper, meaning that we did not investigate the daily press coverage online, nor did we examine opinion material like editorials. To our help we use the framing theory, the Swedish journalism mission with orientation to inform the public, early studies about speculations, news value and news angling. From this we created a coding scheme that we used to examine the articles. During the decoding of our material we sat together and discussed all the uncertainties. Everything that was worth to note we put down in writing. Results and conclusions In our findings, we observed that the news covering of Transportstyrelsen was lined with political aspects. Almost half of the news articles concerned IT security one way or another, but only in nine articles could you find what consequences it had for the public. It was a lot more articles about the aftermath, the political game and the authority. Mostly the news reporting tend toward issue framing, even though the political aspects primarily was depicted as game framing. Even speculations were about the political and general consequences over security consequences.