Vad i Väst är bäst? -En studie om SVT Västs bevakning av kommuner i Västra Götaland

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Sveriges Television, specifically Lokala Nyheter Väst, is distributing its news between the 49 different municipalities in the Västra Götaland county in terms of frequency, which subjects are covered in the news and how these subjects are presented or framed.

The mission of Swedish public service is to have a broad supply of news that reflects the entire country and all its municipalities. The mission includes, among other things, local and regional news reporting. There is a general reduction in commercial local journalism around the country, and this reduction of local media increases the responsibilities of public service. Since 2014, Sveriges Television has been the only media to broadcast local and regional television news, after the commercial TV4 discontinued its local and regional broadcasts. This thesis explores whether or not Sveriges Television lives up to this mission, and the increased responsibility.

To reach our result, we have employed theories on framing, news selection and news evaluation. The method we have used is the quantitative content analysis. Our material is collected from two synthetic weeks of Lokala Nyheter Väst’s TV broadcasts with 240 news features in total. Rather than investigating the 49 municipalities individually, we have divided them into groups based on population density and the number of residents who commute to a larger city or municipality for work.

The result of our analysis shows that Gothenburg, which is the largest city in the county by far, is portrayed in the media much more frequently than any other municipality. The news regarding Gothenburg are also portraying a much broader variety of subjects compared to other municipalities, or groups of municipalities. A conclusion can be drawn that the smaller a municipality is, the more extraordinary the news have to be in order to appear in Lokala Nyheter Väst’s broadcasts. There are also certain municipalities where all news are about one subject, for instance crime, medicine or the environment. This leads to a potentially skewed image of these municipalities, which can result in preconceptions and bias towards these 3 areas or cities. The result also shows that out of the 49 municipalities in Västra Götaland, three of them lack both local media within the municipality and representation in the material we investigated, hence being true so-called “white spots”, areas entirely lacking local media representation.