I allmänhetens tjänst – året runt. En kvantitativ undersökning av public serviceprograms neutralitet under en mellanvalsperiod

Abstract

Title: In the public’s service – always Author: Ebba Heitzmann Level: Bachelor thesis in journalism Term: Autumn 2024 Supervisor: Monica Löfgren Nilsson While several studies about political news reporting during election campaigns have been done, only a limited number of studies have examined political journalism between elections. The purpose of this study is therefore to explore how Swedish news media reports about political issues between elections. Since public service’s neutrality is of extra importance while covering political matters, this study focuses on analyzing material published by public service 2023 and 2024. Since objectivity could be defined in several ways, the primary focus of this study is the idea that news reporting because of the constant need to select and deselect material never can be entirely objective. Instead, there is a need for journalists to frame their reporting and make selections of what and how they portray their information to produce good journalism. In a political setting, this requires a balanced selection of news in order to create unbiased reporting. There are primarily two kinds of media bias: structural and political. The structural bias is linked to the news industry and the organizations journalists work within. Structural bias has been found to be associated with medialization and episodic media coverage. Political bias is on the other hand related to partisan bias and political beliefs that interfere with the news reporting. The method used to analyze the collected data was a quantitative content analysis. It was conducted using an already well-established code sheet, previously used in Medievalsundersökningarna, which this study is inspired by. The purpose of this was to obtain results comparable with research conducted during election campaigns in order to recognize discrepancies between the different durations. It was found that the Swedish government parties were represented more than the opposition parties in the analyzed media. In addition, the issues that dominated the news agenda were mainly matters that benefited the government parties. Despite of this fact, it was not possible to draw conclusions regarding structural or political bias in the news reporting.