A workers’ rights issue - Swedish national news media and the MeToo movement after the first three months

Abstract

The MeToo movement was created in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, and re-emerged October 2017 when actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter to encourage women to respond to her tweet with “Me Too” if they had ever been sexually abused or harassed, to show the magnitude of the problem (Ganetz et al., 2022; Mendes et al., 2018). The Swedish movement turned to collective mobilisation in order to create awareness and demand change – street protests and petitions under industry-specific hashtags were created to highlight the structural issues for women in the workplace, the media, and the home (Ganetz et al., 2022; Pollack, 2019; Rennie, 2022; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2023). MeToo was picked up and portrayed by Swedish news media as a worker’s rights issue, rather than a feminist one (Hansson et al., 2022). The purpose of this thesis was to understand how Swedish news media employs Swedish traditions of strong unions to report on the movement as a question of workers’ rights, and it aimed to answer the research question How do the national news media discuss MeToo when the movement is portrayed as a question of workers’ rights? Previous research focuses on Swedish news media’s reporting on MeToo, criticism and hegemonic struggles that arose after the movement’s initial success. Journalistic practices determined if MeToo was legitimised in the news. Theories used for this paper are hegemony, feminism and language as power, including critical discourse analysis. Hegemony is a form of social power that embeds itself within social and institutional practices which is interpreted as natural (Condit, 1987; Stoddart, 2017). Feminist theory explores the idea of the patriarchy as the current hegemonic ideology while the language section serves to describe how language affects the shaping of our social world, which in turn reinforces or challenges hegemony (Askanius & Møller Hartley, 2019; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002). A thematic analysis in two steps was conducted. The first step was to categorise news articles during the time period and see how many had a focus on specifically workers’ rights. A selection of 154 articles from Sweden’s biggest national print newspapers (Ocast, n.d.) were thematized. The second step thematized six articles which were originally sorted into the theme “Workers’ rights, workplace” from the first step. The results from the second step showed that when the movement is depicted as a workers’ rights issue, four main themes are prevalent in the reporting: Descriptions of the problem, Explanations of the problem, Actors, and Responsibility. Sub-themes within the themes are also found, which are shown and analysed through a feminist standpoint.