Misstänksamhet och Trump-feber - En kvalitativ studie om två svenska tidningars rapportering gällande coronapandemin i USA och Ryssland.

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic has affected the whole world in different ways and each country has had a unique approach towards the crisis. Russia and the United States are both powerful nations that regularly appear in the Swedish media coverage. But how does the Swedish news reflect the current situation in Russia and the United States? In this thesis we have comparatively examined the two biggest Swedish newspapers; Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter of the basis of this issue.

Our purpose is to look deeper into the media coverage and to see which images are reproduced of the two countries. We also want to see if there are any differences between the countries and how they are presented. The question we wanted to ask ourselves whilst doing this is “what picture is given by Trump and the US during the Corona pandemic?” And the same thing but about Putin and Russia. We also asked ourselves “Does the image produced by the media coverage indicate any differences between the countries and if so, then how?” The theories we are using to examine this are above all the Theory of Framing, media logic and journalism during crises.

There are two methods used in this thesis, one quantitative method and one qualitative method. The quantitative method is used to see the media coverage in a bigger perspective, how much is reported in general from the both countries? Also as a pilot study to guide us through the qualitative method. During the qualitative text analysis we have looked deeper into the texts to understand the explicit and implicit meanings of the news articles.

The main findings in this study is that there is an existing negative picture of the news from both countries. They are looked at in different ways, but there is still a framing done to mediate a negative picture. Donald Trump receives a lot of criticism towards him as a person, while Vladimir Putin is represented within a bigger picture of the whole political system of Russia that receives criticism from its inhabitants. Trump is the main focus in the articles that we’ve studied and Putin has a more anonymous approach. The differences can be summarized to the focus on Donald Trump’s actions versus the abstraction of the Russian state.