The Depiction of a Troubled School, a Study of Unbalanced Media

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The purpose of my dissertation is to study an example of a depiction in local media of a troubled school. The dissertation examines the newspaper Sydsvenskan and its reports on the case that developed from the events taking place around the Gustav Adolf’s school in Landskrona. The starting points for the media coverage began on the 18th of January 2007 when the school was closed down. This paper follows Sydsvenskans reporting from that day and the following fourteen days, until the 1st of February. The dissertation focuses on problems such as bias and generalizations that arise in the media or more specifically in Sydsvenskan during this event. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine how a single turbulent event was portrayed in a large local newspaper and to see if the coverage was balanced. A variety of newspaper texts, ranging from articles, editorials and letters to the editor are examined using critical discourse analysis, as developed by linguists Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk. The method attempts to draw lines between the use of language and the exercise of power. My results were divided in two sections, one on racism and one on political bias. Connecting the material to theories on hidden racism as described by van Dijk and the Swedish sociologist Birgitta Löwander, I did not find the reports racist or stereotypical, in fact there are very few references to ethnic divisions in the material. However, there is a clear political bias regarding who is represented in the paper. Politicians from Folkpartiet get more space in the reports than their political counterparts, They...