The mass media play a crucial role in democracies, both in theory and in reality. This is especially valid when the media are reporting or there is a debate in the media on High-threshold-issues like national security and societal threat images. In such areas the media have the power to construct the reality to the media consumers by applying different frames on the issue at hand. This thesis takes on a critical view and examines how well the media have fulfilled their prescriptive roles, which can be summarized as being the source of information; to scrutinize power holders in society; and to serve as an arena for debate. This examination was performed with various types of text analytical methods where the articles of three major news media in Sweden were scrutinized. The result of the examination shows that most articles only provided simplistic information of the issue at hand. The second most common type of article was different types of debate articles. The most interesting result was the fallacy of the mass media to perform their prescriptive role as the scrutinizer of power holders or question the frames that where used by the other agents to describe the national security and societal threat images. Quite the opposite, the media seemed to be dependent on various types of experts and on the reports that were presented to them. This thesis also proclaims that in the end of the investigated period (2005) there seems to have been a hegemonic view between all the different agents, even the press itself, on which societal threats that are valid and why they exists. The lack of critical voices is remarkable. The results of the empirical examination were then compared to ideal types of elite democracy, institutional democracy and deliberative participant democracy. The results show that the mediation and debate have strong similarities with the view that elite democracy have on the role of mass media. Even though there are similarities between the empiri...
