“I’m here because I am a Muslim” : A combined content- discourse analysis on the Swedish media coverage of Muslim-Christian relations in contemporary Egypt.

Abstract: The media plays an important role in forming public opinion, in broad terms media reporting can be described a way of constructing meanings to social events and actions, both fixed and dynamic ones. An in-depth study of the media discourse will therefore allow us, not only to understand the conditions of modern media, but also complex social practises of meaning making. Given the growing importance of fair media representation in times of an ever-increasing globalisation this thesis aims at a better understanding of the Swedish media portrayal of the Egyptian Muslim-Christian relations. The research question is: How is the Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt discursively presented in contemporary printed Swedish news media? A question implying several secondary research questions concerning the way in which media messages are produced, shared and perceived. This thesis is divided in two parts: Primarily, a content analysis of all articles containing words “copts” and “Egypt” from Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter published in print during the last nine years. In this analysis, the source, length, type, topic and presence of women/men were quantified using manual coding and CATA. Based on the results from the content analysis, three article-categories were identified and four articles from these categories chosen for the second analysis, a Critical Discourse Analysis. This analysis builds on the methodological framework by Norman Fairclough as well as the theoretical framework about media representation developed by Stuart Hall and the orientalism discourse critique introduced by Edward Said. The combination of Content analysis and CDA was chosen due to the character of my research question and empirical material. Furthermore, this method triangulation contributed to a higher validity. The findings in this thesis showed us that orientalist discourses were present in a large part of the material, although not undisputed, something that was showed through a identification of three different discursive concepts that were used when portraying the Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt – the coexistence discourse, the complexity discourse and the clashing discourse. In accordance with the hypothesis, the formation of these discourses was proven to depend on a number of factors such as source, author, genre and length. However, the generalizability of this result was lowered by limited empirics and limits in methodology. Further research, building on larger material, on the discursive formation of similar types of media portrayal is therefore recommended.