European Union's path towards a sustainable future : The Swedish media’s portrayal of the plastic ban

Abstract: This study examines the media coverage on the European Union (EU) plastic ban directive in Sweden and investigates the role of the Swedish media in the EU decision-making process. As society and social movements are the driving force for pushing policies forward and affecting policy change, it is important to understand the media’s role in the development. Since media is one core driving force of opinion-building in this decision-making process, this thesis, analyses the media coverage on the topic of plastic to understand the media output that is directed towards the Swedish people. Therefore, the main focus has been to gather and analyze the news coverage on the topic of plastic in two of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet during the adoption of European Union’s Directive 2019/904 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment. By analyzing the media coverage and the international regulations that have been formed by the United Nations and European Union through discourse analysis with the application of the concepts Framing and Europeanization, differences between the media and actors of decision-making have been discovered.