How to Frame a Terrorist - Swedish Newspapers' Reporting on Acts of Terror in the Nordic Countries during the 2010s

Abstract: During the 2010s what could be described as a new “terror-wave” went through Europe, the Nordic countries included, and for a while it was the primary concern for many young Europeans. At the same period, an influx of right-wing parties has gained popularity, both within the European Union and on a national level.This arose the curiosity to investigate how the news coverage on some of the terror attacks differ based on the terrorist’s background. To explore this the thesis conducts a quantitative content analysis on 863 news articles from the four largest newspapers in Sweden. Six acts of terror committed in any of the Nordic countries during the 2010s were ultimately compared and analysed by coding the articles abductively, basing the codes on Entman’s theory of framing. To raise the validity of the study, an external validity was assessed using a representative sample of the Swedish newspapers landscape, and through conducting the coding twice with some space in between resulting in similar conclusions.The analysis demonstrates that there are obvious differences in the framing of the attack, the terrorist and the proposed measures when comparing the coverage of the acts of terror.