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

Abstract: The purpose of my dissertation is to study an example of a depiction in local media of atroubled school. The dissertation examines the newspaper Sydsvenskan and its reports on thecase that developed from the events taking place around the Gustav Adolf’s school inLandskrona. The starting points for the media coverage began on the 18th of January 2007when the school was closed down. This paper follows Sydsvenskans reporting from that dayand the following fourteen days, until the 1st of February. The dissertation focuses onproblems such as bias and generalizations that arise in the media or more specifically inSydsvenskan during this event. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine how a singleturbulent event was portrayed in a large local newspaper and to see if the coverage wasbalanced. A variety of newspaper texts, ranging from articles, editorials and letters to theeditor are examined using critical discourse analysis, as developed by linguists NormanFairclough and Teun van Dijk. The method attempts to draw lines between the use oflanguage and the exercise of power. My results were divided in two sections, one on racismand one on political bias. Connecting the material to theories on hidden racism as describedby van Dijk and the Swedish sociologist Birgitta Löwander, I did not find the reports racist orstereotypical, 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. Politiciansfrom Folkpartiet get more space in the reports than their political counterparts, They arefeatured in more than half of the articles. The political bias is not otherwise present in thecontent, and what is being said is more nuanced than who is actually saying it.